Lots of phones had touchscreens before. It was a combination of the physical design, engineering, UI and feature set that was so ground breaking. The thing is each of these things is intimately connected and depend on each other. You can’t just do one without the other three and have anything worthwhile. That’s why this was so hard.

It’s why analysts that just focuses on one obvious feature - a touch screen - misses the point so badly. If a touch screen was all that mattered, why didn’t the Android team copy one of the previous touch screen phones instead?