A bit of a tangent, and all fanboyism aside, to familiarize yourself with the capabilities of only 128mb of RAM, all you have to do is use the 5800XM for a little bit. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but if you start to keep enough apps open and load a fairly large sized web page, you will start to see out of memory errors and apps close by themselves in the background. I am eagerly awaiting some real user reviews to determine if the same is true in the N97, which I would imagine would be worse with the widgets constantly running (with no option to disable the widget home screen).
The iPhone on the other hand is a completely different beast. It's true that it doesn't "multitask" by the same definition of real smartphone/desktop multitasking, but with push notifications available, Cortex A8 CPU architecture, and 256mb of RAM available, most of the complaints related to a lack of multitasking will probably be eliminated. Again, we'll have to wait until some users get their hands on the device to see if this is the case.
The point is there's no reason to give the N97 credit for having less RAM than the new iPhone until we can really see what difference it makes in real-world usage. Until we do, it's just numbers.