It's not science either. Science requires data and the data overwhelming showed that consumers preferred physical keyboards.
Puahing the iPhone requires one to actually go against the science and against the consumer data. It's unlikely any internal marketing or design team led the way here as their approach would likely be science based. Jobs most likely led the way by intuiting how consumers would change based off of his own experience with the prototypes.
Certainly not super human, but a bit more smarter than your average consumer research scientist to be able to make an analysis that not only goes above science, but against it.
People worship science as the one and only infallible method to answer questions. That's not true. Science needs data and many questions just don't have data available to build an answer. For this kind of thing you need to use induction.