I do. I think it was a revolutionary improvement. It's so much more intuitive to use, it's the one thing that makes your grandma able to use an iPad. It's hard to overstate how important this was. The fact that now you know about it, it seems obvious and not a big deal emphasises how big of an improvement it was.

> It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.

Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.

You miss the point: Most people rejected the Palm Pilot before seeing how you interacted with it at all. The idea that how you interact with the device makes such a big difference is flawed to a large extent because these devices demonstrated quite clearly that there were other issues that stopped mass market adoption of these devices before people even bothered to figure out how you actually interacted with them.