At the time, data was mondo expensive. Everyone was stuck low-bandwidth. Then when the iphone launched, Jobs + Apple did an exclusive with Cingular/AT&T. The talk at the time, was it was a bidding war -- they all wanted the iphone on their network first.
That exclusive opened the door to a phone manufacturer, for the first time, negotiating bandwidth, new data plans and more. RIM didn't have a lot of software that was high bandwidth, because the carriers wouldn't even allow it before Apple broke that hold.
So suddenly here's this new phone, with an exclusive, and with actual usable web browsing with a usable data plan price.... and RIM still begging for that.
(Obviously RIM still could have caught up if they didn't drop the ball, but this was a big shift in the market)
