I'm not struggling to grasp anything; as a person who makes stuff, I'm just empathizing with the iPhone's creators. I think we tend to forget what an "oh shit" moment the iPhone reveal really was - it seems obvious now but it was not at all obvious back then.

I feel the same sense of empathy for the companies Apple occasionally steals stuff from, especially Palm. So much of modern iOS (and Android, but Google hired Matthias...) is cribbed from webOS that it makes me a bit sad.