I'm in the same boat as this guy. I have no love for Apple. They can't even make a decent UK-spec keyboard, for fucks sake. There is nothing more annoying than a Mac user telling me my keys are 'all switched around'. I bought a Mini off eBay to develop a game for the phone, but as soon as I'm done, it's going straight back on eBay. I can't stand it.
I felt the same about the phone too. The main problems were Apples horrible marketing, and Apple fans.
It turns out that the phone is actually very good. My last 4 phones were HTC WinMo smartphones, the most recent was a Touch Diamond. It was fucking atrocious. They tried (like everyone else) to rip off the iPhone interface, and while it works fairly well on a brand new, just rebooted phone, performance soon degraded past the point of frustration. And yes, I was clearing out background tasks, it didn't help. The whole experience was terrible. I removed the 'touch' UI, and went back to the standard winMo interface, and it was better, but I still didn't use it for anything more than a telephone, it was unresponsive.
My brother had an iPhone (which I naturally derided him for for quite some time), and tried it after the 3.0 update. It did everything I expected. The touch/interface was spot on. You didn't have to go far to find apps, some of the games were quite excellent (seriously, flight control is the shit), and I didn't have to ask a single question about anything, it is the very essence of intuitive.
Now I have a mail app that covers 5 mail accounts, an IM client that covers 6 IM accounts, and a ton of other shit. This may have been possible on WinMo, but I really couldn't be arsed to look. Before the iPhone, nobody was offering unlimited internet on phone plans, so there was no real reason to get an IM client.
My next phone will probably be an Android, because I do like HTC's phones, but they tried to make WinMo into something it wasn't and they failed. Hopefully they can do better with android. I've still got 18 months to go on my 3GS though, so I'm not too worried yet.
I can understand the general dislike for the iPhone, but Slashdots general seething hatred of iPhones is really getting out of hand. Seriously, take a step back, you're making the console wars look like a game of tiddlywinks.