I have never heard of this misconception, but fixing the notoriously unreliable mobile coverage by turning existing phones into "satellite (internet!) phones" sounds wild

The much more common misconception is that Internet traffic between continents is carried via satellites.

I was common amongst a portion of the general population in the 90s when people didn't have a clue and couldn't google things.

Phones do receive data from GPS satellites.

I've run into the reverse misconception, people think they need cell service for GPS to work.

I often experience very slow time to fix with cell service off (& having location off beforehand) - I believe this is due to Assisted GNSS/GPS which significantly improves the time for GPS to start working (the associated Wikipedia article states that ~1 minute often without it, and worst case ~12.5 minutes)

Yeah, assisted GPS is great. I remember ye olde GPS consumer receivers taking minutes at a time to find a location while modern phones are of course much better and a lot of it is down to having a network connection to help out. It got so much better so fast that it's easy to forget how janky it could be!

Wifi only iPads and other tablets usually don't have GPS while the cellular versions do.

This is half true, A-GPS makes it work much better.

Location service uses gps (and similar satellite networks), cell and wifi info combined, so they are kind of not wrong. But it's not needed for "GPS" but it's hard to cut through the layers for people?

A phone connection does help for downloading all the data you need to interpret the GPS signals. It's called assisted GPS. Without a connection, it can take upto a few minutes for a GPS receiver to figure out where it is.

Ya know I am now realizing that I always assumed that I thought the link was phone -> tower -> satellite, and I’m just now realizing that that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

They are often off in the woods, though! Do some connect to satellites?

Edit: apparently satellite backhaul is a thing but kinda rare.

I believe it is commom for the tower in this situation to have a point to point link to the another tower.

Bouncing off a geosynchronous satellite makes the latency awful, but it is an option. Fiber, copper, or point to point wireless are better options, though.

Latency for bouncing off LEO satellites isn't too bad though.