You know those mortars you have to bump to stone and then throw as if its a grenade? They inspired Apple design team... They were used for entirely different purposes. There are 2 main usage patterns: better navigation on map (this was far more important in ancient times, but you could use heavenly bodies for same purpose, as the stargazers in pacific ocean have done for millenia) and 2: augmented reality. By the time the latter takes off we're a year further. For if what you say is true there must be many crappy high-end technologies then because last time I checked almost no smartphone, netbook, laptop, digicam (slr), blahblah etc etc blahblah has digital compass. Hmmm, maybe its a bit overrated.