Which iPhone? Version 4? Of course not. 3GS? Have a look at N900. The hardware is pretty much comparable, with N900 being slightly better in many categories. More memory, 32GB storage in every model, twice the screen size, additional flash memory, 2MP more on the camera. Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen.
So out of 4 released iPhones, only the most recent one is definitely better than N900.
That's no small thing though. I had the N810, which I'm pretty sure used the same display and sensor as the N900 and the touch screen was just painful to use.
I think an actually working touch screen sensor has been one of the biggest things the iPhone introduced (or popularized, mobile phones at the time all insisted on resistive sensors, probably because of lower costs).
It easily handles games like NFS in fullscreen with pretty nice shading. Fullscreen movie playback is also good.
Nokia's focus on high end devices is different from the iPhone, and the "technical capabilities" is all in the checkboxes you choose to include.
Physical keyboards, removable storage, removable batteries, 5-band UTMS (the iPhone 4 may have this?), HDMI out, Xenon Flash, FM transmitters, DUN & FTP bluetooth profiles, Adobe Flash, video calling w/o WiFi, and true multi-tasking are all checkboxes that I can use to make the iPhone look like it lacks technical capabilities.
So I think we need to be careful about what we define as lack of technical capabilities. While Symbian may seem less responsive than the iPhone, my opinion is that the iPhone does lots of caching and transitions to make it look smooth while processing. Symbian traditionally has been more baked in functionality than the iPhone, but Symbian certainly is less beautiful.
As someone who uses a recent Series 40 phone, I have to disagree with you. I think their last decent brick was the 6230i.
I got an XpressMusic (don't know the exact model number) Series 40 phone in 2009 , and, although it does the basics well, it has some serious design flaws.
It is a music phone, but it lacks a "stop" button to go with the play/pause button on its side. Therefore it is always on pause, so that, if it is in my pocket, and the "play" button is hit accidentally, a preloaded song called "The Dance of Shiva" starts playing. Very embarrassing.
And if you want to send an SMS, you need to save the number first as a contact, since the SMS UI doesn't allow for numbers in the "number" field.
These are shockingly obvious design flaws that Nokia missed. Something went wrong with Nokia a few years ago, and it wasn't limited to their smartphones.