Here's a another point: People around the world wished for "Personal Hotspot" (where your iPhone becomes a UMTS-Wifi router) for years. I talked to a high-up guy at a big European provider about this wish - reply "Apple won't listen to us". Many even jailbraked their Phone to add a software for $10.
Out comes the Verizon deal, and suddenly the feature is here, both for the Verizon iPhone and the worldwide GSM one. Looks like Apple only ever talked to AT&T and their customers, never to people outside the country.
Another one: the bandwidth-limitation of the YouTube app. Other providers around the world would be happy to move more data, but AT&T says Njet, Apple complies and denies more bandwidth to every iPhone user around the world.
I disagree on the hotspot complaint. People in the US have been asking for hotspot functionality and jailbreaking to get it for years, just like Europe. Similarly with tethering before it showed up.
It's far more likely that the delay was just Apple doing its usual feature triage and taking its time to get hotspot functionality up to their standards.
And with tethering in particular, it seems clear that if Apple only listened to AT&T it wouldn't have even shown up as soon as it did. Or have you forgotten the time-lag between announcement and international availability and when AT&T finally decided to turn it on, even with a steep fee?
If you're iPhone is jailbroken for another $3 you can buy My3G to make apps think they're on WiFi all the time. I use it to download apps > 20MB and see good quality YouTube everywhere.
You can also get higher res video by going to the YouTube site instead of using the app. But if you click a youtube link you have no choice...
I think it makes sense that it's taken a long time for Apple to implement Personal Hotspot; it's a feature that runs in the background that can suck up a lot of battery and add a lot of charges to your plan. I'm sure they had to think a lot about how to best put this into the interface, making it obvious that it's running, easy to turn on/off, etc.
That said, it's my favorite feature of my Nexus One...
Out comes the Verizon deal, and suddenly the feature is here, both for the Verizon iPhone and the worldwide GSM one. Looks like Apple only ever talked to AT&T and their customers, never to people outside the country.
Another one: the bandwidth-limitation of the YouTube app. Other providers around the world would be happy to move more data, but AT&T says Njet, Apple complies and denies more bandwidth to every iPhone user around the world.