A general purpose computer, or a very locked down thin client. Like the world of AOL users.
I would have suggested the latter, otherwise the system would have been a lot more open.
General purpose computers give purchasers administrator/root access by default. If you don't have that, you have a thin client run by someone else.
Phone + iPod + Internet communications device...you are pretty much describing a general purpose computer, no?
And if you go back to the keynote, that was kind of the joke. He started out describing these as if they were separate products being introduced. The punch line was it was just one device. In other words, subtly mocking the idea you needed a separate device for each kind of functionality you wanted.
Lastly, Apple was a computer company from top to bottom. How else would they envision a solution to the problem of crappy phones, but to turn them into computers with really good software? That's just who Apple was.
So the idea of the Apple strategy being replacing the mobile phone with a mobile computer is only obvious in hind sight just isn't true, it was obvious as soon as the iPhone was introduced.