I had a Motorola Q at the time and the first iPhone was light years beyond it, even if the only metric used to compare was browsing the internet. Most sites were barely functional in Windows Mobile IE.
But it had no apps, the analogy works, the iPhone did some things great (web browser:rewrite X in the style of y or whatever) and had some gotchas that seemed like a big deal at the time but were then resolved, or everyone realised it was so good they didn't matter (maybe no keyboard: hallucinations, we thought this was a problem but it's not, and no apps:no knowledge of current events, easy fix)