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It may look like that in hindsight, and given advances in hardware, something with lots of sensors would have been built, but I’m not sure how similar it would have been.

The removal of the keyboard, in particular, was far from universally perceived as a good idea at the time.

I also think it would have been quite a while before anybody would have had the guts to not provide a slot for memory cards or to not have removable batteries.

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I dunno, touch-only had been done before (Newton, Palm), and I think it would have surfaced again. The UI/UX Apple built on top of the technology that was in everyone's (manufacturers) hands, I still think, was the biggest factor in pushing things forward industry-wide.

As important was Apple's brand power. Everyone already had an iPod in their pocket and loved it. That gave them legitimacy to set terms with carriers.

Both had a stylus. Possibly, we could have ended up with many humans embedding a tiny piece of hardware in their index fingers, so that they wouldn’t have to carry a stylus around ;-)

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