Don't forget that Apple's previous phone effort in 2005 was a collaboration with Motorola on the ROKR, aka "iTunes Phone", which was a normal motorola phone except it could sync with iTunes and play media like an iPod

https://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=1362

With that in mind, you can see how someone might look at it and say "ok Apple isn't that serious about phones"

But I'd bet what actually happened was Steve Jobs used one and said "this thing sucks, throw more money at our iPhone project"