Yes, it's less informative, because you're missing the context of why the apples and oranges are lumped together in the pair. FWIW fruit_basket_t is poorly named too, since fruit baskets not things that can count apples and oranges (and nothing else), they are generic containers capable of holding all kinds of fruit.
I like the single-element structs. I've been finding myself doing that more and more in Java and I quite enjoy it. First epiphany was replacing bool with enums.
I don't think "fruit_basket" (or "fruit_counts", say, addressing your later point) really gives much more clue as to why you're grouping these things than does the templated pair. When there is an informative name, use it, to be sure. Occasionally there's not much more reason than "I am using both of these elsewhere. This is much more the case when things are used locally than when they are exposed in interfaces, to be sure.
I like the single-element structs. I've been finding myself doing that more and more in Java and I quite enjoy it. First epiphany was replacing bool with enums.