Agreed, they weren't ready to scrap the design yet. However, I think they are going to make a very, very big deal of it when they put (another?) camera on the front. A big marketing deal.
I don't know if evolutionary advanced countries (cellulary speaking) like Japan have video-to-video chatting, but I think that a lot of people would be all over this.
Apple just has a habit of making a big big deal of almost anything. A few of the things they are certainly justified in touting. But when they claim 10,000 times (within maybe 2 minutes) in the WWDC keynote that MobileMe has ground-breaking webapp usability, I just get intensely annoyed. Cheesiness at its extreme. Sure, desktop-like usability is nice, of course, but it is now common and expected in the best of the webapps.
You can do video-to-video chatting in many countries. Most 3G phones outside of the US have a front-facing camera for exactly this purpose. It's not that great though, I can do video chat on my computer and never use it.
Don't joke: as sad as it sounds, this truly was a huge innovation. No phone device anywhere had ever had a GUI interface to voice mail messages before. At best, it was a clunky front end to the button-activated service we'd been using for 20 years.
I don't own an iPhone - so I guess I have no right to criticize. As much as it is an improvement over regular voicemail, I thought their touting that it was an amazing feature was a bit silly, though.
