I really suspect that this is what your complaints come down to. The maemo devices have very high density screens, so peoole with bad vision tend to have trouble.

Having used both the iPhone and the Touch, I much prefer MicroB to Safari. It's generally better at rendering pages as close to desktop as possible and displays much more data than the iPhone/Touch's smaller and lower density screen. Interestingly, my tech-incompetent mother asks to use my N800 over her iPhone for browsing every time. That could have something to do with my 3.5g phone, though.

I'm not entirely sure what complaints you had with video playback, but the N800 will handle properly encoded video 100% every time.