You forget. Apple's whole strategy is to remove features in order to focus a product. Apple wins by doing less than everyone else.

Who else sells a computer with only one mouse button? Who else sells a phone with only one button? No copy/paste? Awful APIs that prevent you from really reading camera data? First iPod had less disk space than any other player First iPod had no windows support Safari's extension support are crappy relative to FF or even IE OSX dock can display 1/100th the apps of menus on other OSes

Apple's strategy is to cut features. This is roughly equivalent to asceticism: finding enlightenment by doing less. Like asceticism, this seems a bad idea on the surface, but some people really seem happier doing it.

To be totally honest, I had to look up what tethering meant today as I had no idea what the term meant.

Disclaimer: The closest I own to a smart phone is one of these email/phone/web devices they sell in Japan that has a pita interface to use.

True, but the iPhone is new whereas other phone oss' have been around for years. It takes time and manpower to code for these, and you have to start somewhere.

Yeah, and the iPhone started with OS X and went from there. Something tells me OS X can multi-task.

(Keep in mind: Playing music and txting / getting phone calls is multi-tasking.)