That's a very wrong way to describe what happened.

Let me describe you what the phones scene was looking like just before iphone was released. They were fine for making phone calls, sending texts/e-mails (in blackberry case), and taking an occasional photo if you had a high end Nokia. That's it. The phones had very long lists of features nobody actually used. Yes they had rudimenatry browers, but why browse if the pages look nothing like the real ones and it was extremely expensive outside of being connected to wifi.

When iphone was released it was very obvious that it was on a completely different level to what we had until then. Yes, one could argue that it was missing some minor functionalities like SMS character counter which was very standard. But the first time you see it, when you saw that the screen can be smooth scrolled, that you use fingers completely naturally to do any kind of actions (vs styluses which were crap), when you see that everything is presented clearly and nicely, that the screen is nice and bright, and GUI easy to use, it seemed like the device came from the future. In many ways it was like a pocket computer.

I got the second batch of first iphone (the one which could be unlocked by some means so I could use it in my country) and showed it to my friends at college who all had high-end phones. You should have seen their faces. They had no idea what they were looking at. And no, they never watched Jobs's presentation or anything. Most of them didn't even know who he was, or were exposed to any kind of Apple marketing. Actually it was the reverse, Nokia and similar were established brands. The phone was judged on its own and it was almost magical to us.

And I still didn't come to the best thing about it.

It brought internet to your pocket. Not only the browser would render the pages like they've looked on your computer, but it was very usable which was unseen before. Have you actually tried to browse internet on a Nokia phone at that time? It was complete shit. That pinch to zoom/in out was actually revolutionary as well.

The second part of the revolution was people actually wanted to use the phone to browse the internet, so Apple and users both put pressure on the ISPs to lower the prices of cellular data. And believe it or not, they did. They lowered the prices so much to make it from one of the most expensive resources in the world to the cheapest. That alone is groundbreaking.

The third part, even though it happened some very short years after that, was that it enabled programs which were actually usable paving way to the whole mobile app ecosystem which we have now. How many people were writing software for a living on a mobile device before iphone? How many do you think are doing it now? The iphone kickstarted the whole industry.

And all of this was actually made possible by excellent software and hardware design (not fashion, they are usually diametrically opposite!). Nothing of this would happen if it wasn't for that design. If iphone was just another N95, nothing would have happened whatever people thought of Apple marketing. Nothing would have happened if the browser was difficult to use, the UI lagging, or needed a stylus to use. It all had to come together for it work. And they've managed to pull it off spectacularly. It makes it very easy to argue that the most important Jobs' legacy is the iPhone.