For me, when someone point me an iPhone the first association that comes to mind is a brilliantly implemented concept of a deck of cards. This is an essence of

For me, when someone point me an iPhone the first association that comes to mind is a brilliantly implemented concept of a deck of cards. This is an essence of iPhone - not only touch-based interface, but this touch technology along with carefully designed properly sized, cached content with fast possible switching between "cards". The concept of card tricks. That sells. There are the second part - implementation - OSX based kernel, llvm-gcc, webkit-based browser, but all these techniques are ordinary. And of course, they have their sales and marketing. Together that won. btw, N900 is an very interesting move. It could be positioned as a "standard mobile computer" or "just a hardware". In that case community will write everything, like it was in the story of Linux.