Well, transferring files between an iPhone and a Windows PC is still far more of a pain than it should be.

Still can't just treat the phone as a drive and put files on there.

In the same way you can't treat a laptop as a drive and put files on there (transfer from another pc); because it's not a drive.

Except you can on the Mac. Ever heard of Target Disk Mode?

Yes when I want to transfer a few files between Macs my first thought is “let me use target disk mode”.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/transfer-files-mac-...

Seems pretty simple with iCloud for Windows.

So transferring a file between 2 local devices should require sending it to a cloud server and back?

To be fair, apple devices have airdrop for transferring files, which works much more seemlessly than any kind of network drives I've ever used (and I'm using one right now).

The interface exposed is just not mounting a remote file system.

You can’t connect a laptop to another laptop and treat it like a drive. Why expect anything different from a phone that’s really a computer?

If it was a real computer with a 'real OS', I'd be able to easily set up network shares and transfer files over wifi, without even plugging a cable in.

Well I can transfer files wirelessly via AirDrop to my Mac.

You can do it with a third party app

https://mobiletrans.wondershare.com/iphone-transfer/transfer...

I've been using real computers with real OSes for a very, very long time, and when someone says "hey, could you send that file to me," I confess my first thought is not, "Why, sure! Let me just configure a network share that you can mount on your system to do it, because that is obviously the easiest possible way I have at my disposal!"

Yes you can. It's called Target Disk Mode on the Mac.

Yes and you can also easily share files from an iPhone over Wifi on a Mac. That isn’t possible on a Windows PC either.