I think our views are not too dissimilar and I agree with Jobs being exceptional. I also agree that the kind of (only) quantitatively driven science you are des

I think our views are not too dissimilar and I agree with Jobs being exceptional. I also agree that the kind of (only) quantitatively driven science you are describing is not sufficient to predict innovation. However, there are also other, more qualitative, branches of science that work in different ways (I've chosen the phrase "grounded theory" which comes from sociology for that reason). There has been prior work into multi-touch interfaces and all sorts of things related to ubiquitous computing long before the iPhone. Jobs/Apple was aware of this and built on it at the right time - just like they were aware and built on the work at Xerox PARC before.