Apple gets attention for their events mainly by not squandering their goodwill - they don't have an event unless there's something significant (and of visual interest) to show. When they have such an event the pitch has been polished to perfection; they always have a coherent story to tell, something to demo that will ship soon, and a few interesting surprises. And they don't waste anybody's time on platitudes.
If Apple ever got in the habit of giving demos that weren't legitimately newsworthy, they'd stop getting news coverage.
Fair point, their announcements are like clockwork and always involve a major product release.
But at the end of the day isn't it just another gadget? Smartphones and tablets have been mainstream for a few years now and can you honestly say that our lives are so drastically different/better in any meaningful way? They do have a large amount of goodwill coming from their customer but they don't create that goodwill by building anything significantly different from all the other hardware manufacturers. They do it by packaging it very nicely and making the keynotes into events that are very consumable by the media as well as Joe Shmoe the consumer.
It certainly doesn't hurt that these events don't have to appeal to h/w distributors at all since Apple has all the distribution channels by the balls way before their products are even announced.
If Apple ever got in the habit of giving demos that weren't legitimately newsworthy, they'd stop getting news coverage.