The hardware was not -- it was older and it had less RAM and flash, but it wasn't worlds apart. (Indeed as you say they had higher-density displays on some hardware).
And they took those S60 products to market 14, 15 months earlier, with hardware designed much earlier.
The point, again, is learning from the competition, and then execution.
(Execution is why, after all, those Nokia products had to shoehorn Blackberry enterprise support into much more modern hardware; at that point the market cared about Blackberry because Blackberry knew how to execute. The world ran on Blackberry)
We should expect those who come later to do so with better hardware and software. I think the iPhone was impressive but I still think it is worth putting in the effort to see the context and not pretend that it came out of the blue, fully formed and perfect.