… is detailed after the jump in today’s quite good NYT story on his importance to Apple:

But there are other aspects of his role that do not get as much attention and may be more difficult to replace. […]

Mr. Jobs, former Apple employees say, has the authority and long-term vision to yoke Apple managers and employees together under a single cause. At many technology companies, various divisions often work at cross purposes, competing with one other to develop related products. This can lead to devices and software that are sometimes incompatible, frustrating customers.
[…]
Mr. Jobs has also been Apple’s chief deal maker. After introducing the iTunes store in 2003, he persuaded entertainment companies to sell digital versions of their products when they were largely bivouacked, hiding in fear of piracy. In large part because of Mr. Jobs’s efforts, those barriers have fallen, though other challenges remain like getting the Hollywood studios to relax their restrictions on renting or downloading movies over the Internet.

Emphasis added. For the first point, consider the WSJ’s very harsh front-page assessment today of Microsoft’s many missed opportunities to get in the ring with Google:

[B]ehind [Steve Ballmer’s] push to capture a bigger piece of Google’s lucrative business lies an untold story: Nearly a decade ago, early in Mr. Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, Microsoft had its own inner Google and killed it.

In 2000, before Google married Web search with advertising, Microsoft had a rudimentary system that did the same, called Keywords, running on the Web. Advertisers began signing up. But Microsoft executives, in part fearing the company would cannibalize other revenue streams, shut it down after two months.

And for the second, Jobs’s potent intelligence and persuasive abilities may be his most under-appreciated features. As I wrestle with the two most backward technological presences in my life, the car stereo and the cable box, I find myself idly wishing Apple would get into those products. Jobs could knock heads and design and manufacture new editions that would bring them into the 21st century—a Tivo cum iPod for car radios and a combo cable box/computer/Tivo/Apple TV for the TV.

Both products a) make sense and b) would spur growth in all sorts of ways for all the industries involved, but neither will ever get done because those industries work at cross purposes, and none of the borgs involved—car companies, radio broadcasters, cable companies, and the movie studios, for starters—are known for their big-picture vision.

It doesn’t have to be those products in particular; but if Steve Jobs ever comes back to Apple, won’t the loss of that vision and the grit to realize it be the two big things the company loses?