I had the same reaction after my first experience with the iPhone keyboard. But I spoke with people who owned the phone, and they all assured me that your accuracy improves significantly after a day or two with the phone. This turns out to be true. In addition, there’s a very nice typing suggestion feature which will suggest actual words in place of your gibberish (and will go ahead and replace them unless you tell it not to – this can be annoying in its own right, but on the balance corrects more errors than it causes.) So, in fact, if I type “Np, i dudnt grt ab iphpne” on my iPhone, the result is “No, I didn’t get an iPhone,” which is exactly what you wanted.

Safari is also much more user-friendly than you were able to discover in your brief demo. A double-tap will magnify any given column/element to screen width. This is much more efficient than pinching and since you can often see at a glance where on the page your desired content will be, gets you there quickly. For the situations where that’s not practical, you get adept at a simultaneous pinch and scroll technique which speeds things up.

I’m not saying the iPhone is without its annoyances, but I am glad that I spoke to current owners while I was demoing it so I didn’t form too quick a judgment. I was initially uncertain whether wanted one, I don’t for one minute regret my purchase.