There, I said it.
"This programming philosophy will allow you to develop high quality software really quickly, and on the cheap" is the equivalent of a politician promising to fix every problem in the country with no sacrifices required, and put chocolate milk in all the water fountains to boot.
It's always the old thing: fast, cheap, or quick--pick any two.
You beat me to it. Agile is growing like a cancer, every job description at least mentions it if not requiring some experience in it. It seems to me that managers believe that it's 'Agile or die'. It isn't, if you're poor development practices and processes already in place suddenly 'becoming Agile' won't help anything. I've read employee comments about startups like Zygna, while they probably proudly proclaim to be Agile their developers consider it chaotic.
This is the best thing that the iPhone has done for the cell phone industry. Apple doesn't bow down and let the carrier load whatever crap they want to on the phone. This makes the iPhone a much better experience, because an iPhone from Verizon is exactly the same as an iPhone from AT&T and it exactly the same as an iPhone you purchase directly from Apple. The only difference is that the carrier specific phones have been locked to that provider, but that's acceptable since you're getting the phone at a huge discount. I wish more handset makes, especially the big ones (HTC, Motorola, Nokia) would do the same to offer their customers a much better and more consistent experience.
If you purchase a phone directly from Nokia you get the clean firmware.
I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ... -- F. H. Wales (1936)