T9 is/was a feature of nearly every feature phone available after its introduction.

Swype has the potential to be T9 for touchscreens. There's a lot of money to be made licensing that technology.

I texted as little as possible before swype. Now I prefer it to talking.

I think they wanted a 7x return on investment. But you are right, I don't see the value either... unless they have some seriously good language models built in 50 languages and the patents surrounding their interface, models, etc.