His was so insanely great that five weeks later, we almost forget one important fact: The iPhone doesn't exist -- at least as a shipping product.

Neither you nor I has ever so much as touched an iPhone. Almost everything we know about the iPhone came from one big sales pitch. The iPhone could be the greatest device every manufactured. Or it could be a horrible flop like the Newton. .

Jobs' iPhone demo was so powerful that he actually made people believe that Apple invented a whole new user interface. In fact, Apple did something more important than that. The company took some of the best -- hitherto obscure -- UI research and put it into a product that you will be able to buy. It did the same thing with the original Apple computer, the Mac, and with the iPod.

This is how Apple changes the world. It takes awesome research out of other people's labs, polishes and perfects it, and then ship it as warm-and-fuzzy consumer products everyone can buy.

Succeed or fail, the iPhone will be remembered as the first major step toward the third-generation PC user interface.