There's a lot of truth to that. Multitasking for multitasking's sake on such a limited platform (CPU, RAM and most importantly Battery) can be a loose cannon. And going by iPhone's example, they have actually enabled 'multitasking' (or rather background execution) for some of the most common tasks:

- Email checking
- Music\podcast playback
- Application update

There are also a class of apps that are apparently been better run as external services that delivers 'push notification' only when there's something new:

- RSS reader, social web clients and the likes
- IM apps are almost usable in this setup, because they are idle and consuming some resources for most of the time

And the true apps that require multitasking, mostly with streaming:

- terminals
- downloader (p2p, media streamer, file downloader)
- live constant chat (irc, conference mode IM)

So if you want to boast about multitasking, to make it the showcase feature of the platform, make sure you use the right class of apps to present.. otherwise they'd just be idle drain of resources on your limited device.