What is the quintessential Apple II?

["N.N. Thayer" <nnthayer@hotmail.com>]

I ran across a photo set of someone's platinum IIe, and they had
referred to it as "the quintessential Apple II."  The platinum //e
epitomizes Wozniak's creed of chip reduction - it has the fewest chips
of any Apple II, although some of them are custom, not-off-the-shelf
units.  It has a built-in numeric keypad, which some might say the II
should've had from the start, but at the same time, not everyone used
their computers for programming or heavy data input, and it raised
production costs (granted, not so much by 1987, when Apple had
economies of scale).  Seems to me the chief idea behind the II was to
build as you like.  The platinum IIe was also introduced during the
latter half of the II line's life cycle.

Personally I think the Apple II+, while not the seller in sheer numbers
that the IIe was, fits the bill a little better.  It came at the height
of Apple's influence over the computer industry as a whole, not just in
educational or desktop publishing markets.  According to Woz, from
1980-1982 it was the best-selling personal computer worldwide; games
and many apps were written first and foremost for the Apple II
platform.  Any microcomputer mag from that period reinforces this,
especially Computer Gaming World.  It had the basics that you'd expect
from a modern II - Autostart, the full color palette in hi-res, plus
plenty of ways to bring it close to IIe-level functionality if you
wanted to.

Discuss!  It's a fun exploratory question if nothing else, I'm sure we
all have different criteria.