The Internet browsing is real enough to do gmail, NYT, and my admin interface without a line of modification from this bog standard flip phone. Oh, obviously, hn works too.
But you can do that on pretty much any western smartphone, and it's not a particularly new feature. Whether it's good enough to encourage mass adoption is another thing entirely. The Japanese phones do not have a new amazing browser that makes Opera Mini and the Webkit-based browsers common in western phones look like crap, nor do they have bigger, high-resolution screens. The mass adoption webbrowsing on cellphones in Japan is due to widespread use of cellphone-friendly layouts (single narrow column with minimal graphics) on Japanese webpages, and cheaper data plans.