I suspect that that he's talking more about the update to the 3G that rendered the phone almost unusably slow for a substantial proportion of users. Unfortunately they never did bother to fix it.
As a former owner of a 3G, they did (attempt) with iOS 4.2.1, which significantly improved the situation over the absolutely dreadful 4.0 and 4.1 series. It wasn't back to 3.2 levels by any means (there's only so much you can do when the phone had barely 30MB of RAM headroom when released — and yes, I think AAPL are stingy fuckers on their RAM, the original iPad looks like it has the exact same issue with iOS 6) but it did make the phone work again.
Yeah, I probably overstated my case - I think some people did find their situation rather improved. My wife's 3G never got any better, unfortunately :-/.
What really annoyed me with the situation was that they didn't release a good way (afaik) to downgrade your OS back if you didn't have a good backup. I expect that from a commodity manufacturer, but given Apple's premium reputation I tend to expect a quality response when they screw up.
That said, I still buy their stuff, so maybe that's why they don't care ;)
As a former owner of a 3G, they did (attempt) with iOS 4.2.1, which significantly improved the situation over the absolutely dreadful 4.0 and 4.1 series. It wasn't back to 3.2 levels by any means (there's only so much you can do when the phone had barely 30MB of RAM headroom when released — and yes, I think AAPL are stingy fuckers on their RAM, the original iPad looks like it has the exact same issue with iOS 6) but it did make the phone work again.