The entire phone market is unrecognizable. Blackberry, Nokia and Palm are gone. Microsoft is irrelevant. Multi-touch is everywhere. Pens and styluses are relegated to art accessory status. Finally, the modern Apple inspired smartphone has become the dominant computing platform on the planet. It's the primary way most people interact with computers and networks.

By value the Apple computing ecosystem is utterly and completely dominant. Their annual revenue is $215 Bn. That's about the same as Microsoft, Intel and Google put together. By a recent estimate they make 104% of the profits in the mobile industry (taking into account other company's losses) and for along time made more profit in the PC market than all the Windows OEMs put together (edited - not sure if that's still true).

I worked in telecoms back in 2006. Nobody knew what a smartphone should look like. There were all kinds of crazy ideas that the mobile handset form factor could come in various different shapes with curved screens, circular screens, voice interfaces with no screen. Apple showed us what the future would look like and why. They figured it all out and got it right first time not just in terms of physical design but multi-touch interface, app store, open internet connectivity (remember WAP?). It was a slow-burn revolution though. It took time for them to scale up production and perfect the product, and for the market itself to catch up to what was happening so a lot of people just didn't realize what was happening or why.

edit - ok, sorry if I misunderstood your point. Fortunately I didn't down vote you, but I usually don't when I reply to people. I think the above stands on it's own though.