I did wonder that to myself as I stood in the rain yesterday trying to compose an email on a damp screen with the phone typing garbage due to conflicting inputs.
Touch screens are great for consumption and lousy for creation. Even this comment required eleven corrections to the swiped words. Twelve.
Honestly, when iPhone first came out it was pretty much a toy. No apps? Even dumbphones could run J2ME stuff!
It's only when iPhones got the App Store that things got serious.
But anyone who didn't see the danger of that "toy" running actual apps, or didn't see the need to revamp their user interface to beat, ended up losing.
By "reacted the way they did" you mean "bought all of them as they hit the shelves"?
Apple captured 20% of the smartphone market the first quarter the iPhone was released, outselling Nokia, Palm, and Motorola combined.
Nobody was seemingly all that upset they couldn't play yet another crappy J2ME version of "snake" that took 45 seconds to load. Roughly 0% of consumers knew what the hell J2ME even was. They did, however, see a cell phone with an actual web browser instead of some low-res, Javascriptless WAP disappointment. Not to mention a YouTube client and a decent camera plus photo app.
iPhone was great before apps. The full featured touch browser was a revelation. You could look up anything, from anywhere. I still spend 70% of my time in the iPhone browser, not in apps.
