Heh. Have you looked at Hacker News on an iPhone? Zoom doesn't do much good when you have to pan and zoom to read each line of text.
Funny, I was just reading this on an iPhone and it's completely legible (even in portrait mode).
Your eyes must be better than mine, because I have to hold my phone about 4 inches from my eyes to read it, and even then it's too small to be comfortable for more than a few seconds. And on a non-retina screen, it's just hopeless.
Voting is really hard too. I just don't bother voting anymore on iDevices until there is at least a 40x40 button I can use with my stubby fingers.
I think that falls under "deliberately using crap HTML" ;)
The Subtle network, on an iPad2, in portrait. Somehow, they manage to cut off the text of the body column.
So, not exactly too small, but too narrow.
That's a design failure (position:fixed also makes it crap), but it's not related to text/element size anyway.