I believe that Apple thinks the timer will actually fire at its given interval, while in games it is not actually the case, it will fire as soon as the previous loop is completed, which is exactly what we want. Of course creating a game with 10000fps would be nonsense, but that never happens anyway.

I understand the worry about CPU burn for a non-game app, which may do absolutely nothing during its idle loop, and a high timer frequency will waste a lot of resources on doing nothing very often.

I believe you are correct DoG. Too bad the Tech Q&A doesn't read easily enough to make that distinction apparent (at least not from game developers' point of view).