On older Apple 68k machines, having an Apple-branded CDROM means you can be assured it'll boot (though it's rumored that many generic SCSI CDROMs work for booting) and also that it'll "just work" on most of the OSs.
I'm not sure if it has anything to do with it, but over on the early SGI and Sun and NeXT stuff you had to change the block size on the CD-ROM to get them to work. The early Toshiba drives had solder pads that could be split open or re-closed to change block sizes and such to get them to work on all of the different hardware types.
-- Ethan O'Toole
