This is an American issue, one which is almost entirely irrelevant and more or less not deserving of any deeper emotion than "Meh"

Americans for a lot of years now have been fed a diet of antiquated mobile technology, low to mid range stuff. The average phone purchase is made via contract through one of several telecommunications carriers - phones are frequently crippled and heavily subsidized.

Along comes the iPhone, pretty mediocre in regard to features, plenty of better phones for sale at that time. About the only relevant aspect of the whole iPhone craze was the capacitive touch screen - not new technology, but certainly it made the rest of the industry hurry up in designing better input methods.

People are basically self delusional.

The leading edge of technology doesn't stand still for long - every few months something new and more shiny comes along.

I do like the iPhone 4 hardware specs, hopefully Nokia will up the bar a bit with whatever their next iteration happens to be. The N8 is certainly one I wont be buying, symbian is still symbian, even if it's all polished : )