It's not about buttons or even copy-paste as weird as that sounds for a techie.
But zooming on a map with your fingers was a game changer. Zooming an imagine with your fingers. Using your fingers to scroll a list, naturally. And lists are probably the most common UI element except for buttons, labels and images. They're for sure the most common complex element.
It wasn't a "few features" (techie speak), it was a "new way of working" (usually marketing speak, but here it was actually true).
W11 is a few missing features for an existing way of working.
The iPhone had a few missing features for a fundamentally new way of working that was much superior to existing smartphones.
Your complaint was like the handlebars on the new bike being hard to push (which I can workaround by pushing harder, up to a point) while the old bike had square wheels and a chassis meant only for square wheels (which I could not work around).
pinch to zoom doesn't interfere in any way with easy app installation or easy files transfer, they can coexist (and they do, on android), sync simply doesn't work when you want to quickly drop that one specific file and keep moving, sync doesn't work when one device has much bigger storage than the other, sync doesn't work when you want to easily remove files from one device
"paradigm shift" to golden cage is not a good thing, apple intended to take all responsibility from users but at a cost of being unable to do anything efficiently
The original iPhone didn't have an app store, apps were supposed to be web apps.
If you're going to rewrite history, at least do it well.
I get it, you're a techie, just like me. I use Android, I don't like iOS.
But to deny that for the average person the iPhone was the first usable smartphone is just silly at this point.
Navigating a 2D space with my fingers, just dragging around or pinching to zoom, is also much, much faster and more convenient faster than than doing the same with arrow keys (again, either physical or on-display ones).
And navigating through the OS and apps, either through lists and 2D spaces (websites, images, maps, videos, etc.) is a lot more common than copying files around on phones. 100:1, probably. Again, some techie/advanced functionality was lost at the start, but the time and frustration savings from those basic yet intuitive features heavily outweighed their loss.
If you don't agree with this, I guess you either haven't tried pre-iPhone smartphones or you just have a very unorthodox opinion and I'm not very keen to continue this conversation.
It's more like switching from using a spook to move soup to your bowl to eating a sandwich instead
It took until last year to get an apps list and not have to have everything pinned to my start screen.
Don't even get me started on the Blackberry devices of the era. Missed the keyboard still though.
HTC, Sony, Moto, RIM - there's a reason these companies barely exist in the same form anymore. Samsung were the first to consistently catch-up to Apple - largely because they're official strategy at that point was 'copy Apple'
iPhone was ways ahead in usability compared to everything else back then.
For all the faults of Apple, they needed to define how smartphones look like and act. Mobile OSes were horrible pain to use. People tolerated that because there was nothing else out there.