I agree. At the time of its initial release the iPhone "simply" was a combination of 3 main ingredients - as repeatedly stated during the presentation: Phone, iPod, Browser. And that was ambitious enough if you consider the flawless execution: While these features have been done before they always felt subpar: Music players as an afterthought and Opera Mini as a state of the art mobile browser.

The idea of apps emerged as an obvious next step and always felt like a demand by developers and users rather than something planned long ahead in Cupertino.