It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.
How exactly does this contribute to the discussion,
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?
To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years).
The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history.
Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.
Or do people think Apple invented that, too?
And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.