For me, everything you mentioned is unfortunate and a massive pain in the ass for developers, but not anything that holds back the floodgates of anything terribly exciting. (Maybe it is just my lack of imagination?)

The idea that mobile is categorically the future of everything has been on my valley echo chamber meme death watch list for years.

Everything you say is true. Fundamentally I think it can all be distilled down to:

- "Feudal" platforms -- total control by a single vendor, essentially like a game console rather than a "real computer."

- Heavily restricted both by app store policies and by technical limitations like battery life, etc. Put these together and whole vast areas are just off limits.

- Tiny screen and limited UI -- it's great for quick interactions, but terrible for anything deep or engaging.

Mobile is tremendously useful, but it is not going to replace "everything."

The largest, most profitable, and most transformative company to come out of the web (so far) was Google. For Mobile I personally think it's going to be Uber, since that particular use case is just such an insanely awesome killer app. It's impossible to say for sure, but with the web there was only one Google. Not sure there's going to be another Uber. (Note that I'm not counting Maps, the other killer app for mobile, because that's typically bundled so it's not a third party opportunity.)

My biggest issue with iOS it has no usable web browser. Zooming doesn't reflow column text to screen width. IMHO, the single most important feature in a mobile phone web browser.

So now web site authors have started to make these horrendous mobile versions with zoom-locked viewports.

Opera is still the only way to go for mobile phones. Note, not Opera Mini, but Opera.

So far this issue has kept me away from iPhone.

I'm a bit confused. Why would you want that? Shouldn't zooming just make things bigger?

When text reflows while zooming, you can choose exactly the size that is most readable for you.

For example, if I read while walking, I usually make text size larger, because it improves reading speed.

And you can comfortably use desktop versions of websites.

The difference is mainly intelligently limiting DIVs (columns) individually to the available viewport horizontal space. Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus does not do this, it tries to fit whole width.

Shame that other mobile browsers have made it their mission to imitate whatever mobile Safari is doing.

It can be an annoying feature, though there are other things that can be annoying about actually reflowing the text as well, as a lot of the mobile layouts are already cramped, and as such zooming could cause other issues.

It's a situation where you're given several really bad options, and you need to pick one you feel is most optimal. Locking the viewport to a specific zoom-level to prevent the side-to-side swiping is an accessibility issue, but makes the layout simpler.

No, it's fine, as long as it reflows individual columns to full screen width. Reflowing whole width (multiple columns side by side) is not useful (like what desktop browsers do) exactly because it'd get too cramped on a mobile device screen.