More accurately, the iphone makes calls much worse than the average 'dumbphone'.. Also: randomly calls people by itself sometimes.

It's good as a mobile computing device, especially jailbroken to avoid apple's walled garden bullshit, but the "phone" part seems to have been an afterthought.

Well, sort of. 95% of the break was done by fail0verflow, who I think it's safe to say don't hold Hotz or his motives in particularly high regard. They quite deliberately stopped at the point where they could run homebrew unrestricted, since going further had no use other than piracy. Predictably, Hotz did that extra part and released it as a pirate-friendly "jailbreak.zip".

Whilst the DMCA is total bullshit, it's hard to feel too much sympathy for him. He did something that had no purpose other than enabling piracy / cheating, he surely knew that was a DMCA violation, and he attached his name to it loud and proud. His defence will probably try to argue that the jailbreaking exemption applied to cellphones should be extended to consoles, but it seems far more likely he did this for purely egotistical reasons than as high-minded civil disobedience.