A lot of people are critiquing the iPhone example specifically, but consider that Google itself was way beyond the 2nd search engine on the internet... more like the 5th at least, just counting ones with significant traction like (from memory) Webcrawler, Excite, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc. And search engines are black boxes.

I think in general, it's easy to overestimate the long-term value of a first-mover advantage.