i dont think arrington understands mobile at all ... mobilecrunch has always been awful, this piece puts waaay too much weight on the iphone - its a tiny proportion of the mobile installed base.
Its also not about the iPhone but about what the iPhone represents - a whole new way of making the web and networking personal and portable. Right now the iPhone is the platform that is currently deployed that really gets it, but Google's Android platform and the Nokia Maemo platforms are right behind. In fact Android may not be as pretty but its direct to the middleware access may actually may be a platform thats more accessible for developers.
of course I'm biased my YC application is directly in this space ;-) but I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think its the real Web 3.0