Symbian had 60fps one-to-one correspondence with your touch on a multi-touch surface in a handheld computer? It had a high priority animation thread that continued to run even if your application crashed? I was never a Symbian developer, but I don't recall any pre-iPhone Symbian devices performing in this way.
The examples I gave were all about driving the physics-based movement of an OpenGL based UI compositor on a very rudimentary mobile GPU. It's putting your finger on the screen and getting an instant response from the underlying visuals, and having that response tracked perfectly across the surface of the screen.
The innovations in iOS (e.g., resuming an app by showing a screenshot of it's last use while it came to the foreground) were all in favour of increased perception of responsiveness and actual increased responsiveness. Not just about maintaining battery efficiency.