I can at least understand it takes a bit of engineering to heave a nearly million pound piece of metal in the air. Twitter just doesn't have the same cachet. Hell, it's only 140 characters, how hard could it be?
I don't think Twitter is an adequate comparison. Even within the developer world you get plenty of programmers saying Twitter is a "weekend toy project" to implement. (And in many respects it is, for the functionality--the more interesting bit is handing the massive user load.) A more apt comparison may be with the Linux Kernel, or Windows 7.