Except that his phonetic sequence probably wasn't entirely correct. We don't repeat what we hear, we repeat what we think we hear, after we put our native tongue's filter over it to try to make sense of it. So what he said to Google voice probably wasn't completely accurate, but it still knew what he was talking about.
I don't know much about how Safari is for developers, but in my experience it is currently the best browser for the mac. The general performance of the browser (don't know about js benchmarks) and energy usage are a lot better. Also js based drag and drop is remarkably responsive, a lot more so than Chrome and Firefox. It does have a weird thing where it doesn't load Google sites for me sometimes.