The reason these stories are constantly appearing on HN, nearly 4 years since the iPhone was introduced, is because those who want to diminish the invention of multi-touch, like everyone else, sat awed at the iPhone when it was first introduced. That was a very magical moment, and if the iPhone hadn't been a radical departure, then it would have been just another cell phone introduction. It's not often you get to see a new technology that seems magical for the first time.
Theil is talking in terms of making a dent in society. Obviously his standards for a "dent in the universe" are different than Steve Jobs. That's fine for him, but don't confuse it for support for your ideology.
There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone. (and every time I bring this up, some one posts a link to thin-plastic keyboards from the 1970s, or the screens of the automated ticket stand at movie theaters as if they were the same.) The technology for understanding the shape of the finger when in contact with a touch sensitive display, and being able to reduce that amorphous blob down to a single pixel-- and get the pixel the user intended to touch, instead of the one at the center, or whatever, had never been done, let alone, tracking multiple fingers at the same time, a non-trivial problem. This invention enabled a raft of innovations that Apple spent 7 years developing that resulted in only the second new user interface paradigm in my lifetime- touch UI. (The first being the GUI, which was also developed under Steve Jobs.)
There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.) Another manifestation of it is to pretend like the products of the mind have no value at all, and one way they like to do this is to pretend like its only "good marketing" that made the iPhone successful because it was just a random collection of parts that had been invented before.
Sure, LCD screens, Mac OS X, ARM CPUs, RAM, Flash memory and lithium polymer batteries existed before, and with the exception of OS X, all had appeared in other phones. To them, that means that there's nothing innovative about the iPhone. Innovation doesn't exist in their ideology, in fact, it demolishes their ideology, so they have to pretend like nothing was invented for the iPhone. Inevitably, when anyone expresses any defense of innovation you get a lot of nonsense claims about touch panel displays int he 1970s as if that were "prior art" for multi-touch. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.)
To the extent that this ideology has succeeded in america, we have an economic depression, little growth in industry, a great shrinking in american manufacturing jobs (because this ideology has regulated them out of being competitive with the world market) etc.
This ideology might even succeed to the point where a major institution of this country, enshrined in the constitution itself, is destroyed, simply because Google wants to make a competitive phone without bothering to spend 7 years coming up with something innovative itself.
That would be a real shame... because the place that road leads is one where the president has a "kill switch" for the internet, things like SOPA are the law of the land, and startups have to get permission from government to operate their businesses, just like manufacturers do now, and said permission isn't going to come unless you have a lot of pull. We've seen what government control over the purse strings in an "innovative" area results in: Democratic contributors getting $500M loans from government for "green energy" only to go bust a few years later... its just a looting of the public for the direct benefit of politicians and their friends. This is the aristocracy of "pull".
It's instructive to remember that Theil is a prominent libertarian, and thus very clearly not a proponent of this ideology.
All this has happened before, and repeatedly. The USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. I understand that Hacker News is frequented by a lot of college age or early 20s hackers. Don't fall for the anti-innovation, anti-mind, anti-science, anti-intellectual ideology that says Apple is evil for inventing new things or putting the product and customer first, and those who just ship ripoff products are to be commended.
Don't fall for the claims that inventing is useless, and that america is destined to just be like china (Where everything we make is a ripoff of something invented somewhere else.)
To paraphrase Margarat Thatcher: The problem with not inventing anything yourself is, eventually you run out of other people's inventions to rip off.
In fact you can see this now: The android market is commoditized. Nobody is innovating, and nobody is making any money. In fact, Apples commanding %56 of the entire phone industries profits with only %5 of the smartphones, while most phones still aren't even smartphones. (this is why android marketshare is surging, its becoming the new feature phone).
This is a significant lesson for people who want to do startups. I learned it by trying to sell things on ebay when I was young:
If you don't have anything unique or innovative, you can only compete on price. And that's a race to the bottom.
To the extent that innovative companies can succeed, it is good for the startup economy. To the extent that anything innovative is ripped off, with no recourse, then the larger companies will maintain dominance because newer companies have nothing to compete with, and can't compete on economies of scale. The more things go that way, the less viable startups become and the less innovation society will have from which to benefit.