honestly, you said you can admit the iphone short comings, so please do so.
Apple said it did not use 3g because it would have increased the size of the phone + decreased battery life.. that's deffinetly a shame on apple, obv. if other smaller phones are doing it, the iphone's size would not be drastically changed, and decreased battery life? a user-replaceable battery with a free spare would've solved that problem
i love apple, but imo, apple was a little to greedy... and i'm sure apple could've persuaded at-t to make their 3g data plan much cheaper for the iphone since cingular blindly accepted to supporting the iphone in the first place.