+1 on the UniFi gear. I think it's the closest to what apple was trying to go for but a lot more complex. Their site isn't all that clear what you need when you're looking at the products and their documentation kind of assumes you can read their mind - especially if you get an edgemax router with a first gen firmware on it. But, once it's all up and running adding new devices is actually quite nice with the controller app.
There is a reason for this, if I remember correctly, some of the core Ubiquiti engineers were actually senior devs at Apple. I have personally quite enjoyed Ubiquiti, for all their faults, I still find them better than almost every alternative at the current moment.
How do you compare it to just buying nice off-the-shelf APs and installing OpenWRT on them? I've been doing that for quite a while now and it's reasonably painless. The things I've seen mentioned are that Ubiquiti makes the config easier (don't really care at this point) and has better support for seamless handoff which was an issue when doing VoIP over WiFi sounded like a good idea but these days normal cell coverage is too good and too cheap to bother.
Ubiquiti gear is just a step above the rest of consumer gear. You can get similar performance and coverage with something like Asus or TP-Link hardware running OpenWRT, but you won't get things like staggered upgrades, seamless AP handoff, nice looking hardware (their AP's use PoE and look like a smoke detector), or a centralized management console. Basically, if you want to run more than one AP, save some money and buy a couple of UniFi AP's. It'll actually be cheaper than top of the line routers, and will be much more reliable.
I've found their APs to be far better - There's a reason a lot of businesses have ended up installing them. I used to buy regular aps and install openwrt but I could never quite get the performance out of them that I wanted. I've been able to max out my gigabit connection with the UAC-PRO
The hardware does seem tempting. I've been planning on buying one of their APs and just using it like my others by installing OpenWRT as well. Their bullet line in particular seems quite tempting for simple outdoor applications. I'm not too keen on not using open source firmware because I don't like having lock-in going forward, and the added features don't seem particularly tempting for me.
