If it wasn't Tim Cook's Apple before, it definitely is now.

There was a moment in Tuesday's event when Apple really became Cook's company. After unveiling the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Pay, the CEO did something he hasn't done since he took over from Steve Jobs back in 2011. After recapping the announcements so far, he paused, looked at the audience and said he wanted to show them "one more thing…"

It's strangely ironic that Cook's biggest coming-into-his-own moment was one of Jobs' signature moves. But as my colleague Lance Ulanoff observed, the dramatic device is Apple's as much as it is Jobs'. By using it to introduce the first brand-new product under his leadership, the Apple Watch, Cook made the line — and the company — his own.

"To me that showed that Tim respected the history of Apple, he respected Steve and he respected everything it stood for," said Jim Dalrymple, editor-in-chief of tech-news site The Loop. He could have used another phrase. He didn't do it to be like Steve — it was showing respect for what Steve did.

No shortage of vision

It's also clear that although Cook isn't Jobs, Cook's Apple still carries plenty of Jobs' DNA. As has been said many times, Cook isn't the same product and design visionary that Jobs is credited with being. But the idea of pursuing a vision with tenacious focus is something that Jobs hard-wired into the company he founded. At Tuesday's event, Cook showed he can keep that machine running — no matter who is doing the actual envisioning.

When Cook formally took the reins of Apple, but he had been running day-to-day operations at the company for quite a while. And Jobs didn't leave the company in a vacuum — it had a multi-year product map that Cook inherited, with which they've done pretty well.

It appears that now, three years later, it's run out. But judging from yesterday's unveilings of big-screen iPhones, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, Cook and his team haven't been sitting around, staying content to do incremental updates to products released under Jobs. They also show how Cook's thinking both emulates and differs from his predecessor's.

The existence of the iPhone 6 Plus is a good example of the latter. While the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 would already have been the biggest iPhone yet by far, the 6 Plus is clearly intended to give "phablet" customers an option that runs iOS. Whereas Jobs often scoffed at simply entering markets just because he could, Cook seems to have thought Apple was leaving too much money on the table by staying away from big-screen phones. If there was any product in Tuesday's event that Jobs would have disapproved of, it was the biggie-size iPhone.

With the Apple Watch, though, Cook didn't see money as much as opportunity. Apple design chief Jony Ive told ABC News that he'd been working on the Apple Watch for three years, which not so coincidentally lines up closely with when Cook took over.

The Apple Watch is clearly Ive's baby, and Cook was more than happy to name him first when he thanked the many people who made it happen. Ive has also been speaking publicly much more than he used to under Jobs. Under Cook, Apple's lieutenants (senior vice-president of senior engineering Craig Federighi and senior vice-president of Internet software and services Eddie Cue included) have risen, and there's no shortage of people offering up visions.

But it was Cook's call to launch a smartwatch, and it's a decision that will determine much of his legacy as CEO. Apple's take on wearables looks like one of the best so far, and Cook was smart to involve the fashion industry from the start — something Jobs, who was deeply certain of his own good judgment about how products should look and feel, might not have done.

"I think [Jobs] is so talented in the design sphere and had an instinctive grasp of what creating a great technology product was, that perhaps he would have not seen the need to hire people with that specific expertise," said analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research. "Tim Cook, who is very open to the idea that he doesn't know everything, wouldn't be threatened by those people."

Still, it's an unproven product in an unproven category. The Apple Watch will probably sell better than any previous smartwatch, but that's rather like winning gold in an exhibition event at the Olympics. People have yet to be convinced that a smartwatch is something they need, and the Apple Watch — as interesting as it is — doesn't necessarily do that. Then again, similar things were said about the iPad when it debuted.

Apple Pay: The real legacy

Regardless of how well the Apple Watch does, Cook has probably already ensured his legacy with Apple Pay. It's in this new service where Cook really captures the spirit of Apple: Take a broken industry, and then ride in with a product that fixes it.

"Most people that have worked on this have started by focusing on creating a business model that's centered around their self-interest instead of focusing on the user experience," Cook said during the keynote. "We love this kind of problem. This is exactly what Apple does best."

Apple Pay has much greater potential to do what Steve Jobs so often said he wanted to do with Apple: change the world. Granted, mobile payments have been successful in other regions (notably Japan), but they face significant hurdles in the U.S. and other regions — hurdles that proved too difficult for the likes of Google, the wireless carriers and credit-card companies. But not Apple, apparently. It's yet to be seen whether people will actually use Apple Pay, but the company — more than any other party so far — has made it as convenient as possible.

"When you look at any retail line, what are people doing when they're standing in line?" The Loop's Dalrymple asked. "They have their phones out. Now, you just point your phone and the payment machine, and you're done. That's the way it should be done."

Apple's done this before with another kind of service: iTunes. Apple likes to say it changed the way we listen to music with iTunes and the iPod, and in this case, it's not hyperbole. With Apple Pay, Cook's Apple is poised to do the same with mobile payments.

Cook has endured a lot of skepticism about his legacy and ability to pull off spectacular unveilings and uber-savvy business moves since he took over the top spot at Apple. But if he proved anything on Tuesday, it's that his Apple has the same ambition and visionary thinking it did under Jobs. It's just now the man in the middle is content to share it.