Well, I have yet to see the iPhone apps that help forming the kind of closed communities between iPhone users he describes. But what I've seen is the often mentioned ease of use the iPhone brought to a mass audience. An old Mac slogan was "the computer for the rest of us", the iPhone became kind of the "smartphone for the rest of us."
I agree with gerbick that the iPhone "owns" most of the Mindshare right now. But that doesn't have to stay that way and the mobile landscape is still very heterogeneous and it doesn't really look like there is the one mobile killer app on the horizon that will push one device to the top. That's what makes this field so interesting to me