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This won't be a problem, and that prognosis has nothing to do with the fact that it's the iPhone that's affected. The carriers own the networks. Unlike Internet worms, which spread "in the wild", these messages would have to pass through the carriers' networks to get from one iPhone to another. The carriers can just filter them out, whether the phones are patched or not.

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Of course it would be a problem, due to the fact that they can't respond instantaneously. In order to block these messages, AT&T would have to first 1) realize that there is a problem, 2) figure out what to filter, 3) implement the filter. By the time they did all this, the worm would have already spread to most phones which are turned on. It could easily infect 500,000 phones before AT&T were able to respond.

If, for example, someone released a worm which sent an infected SMS to all contacts and proceeded to permanently destroy the device's baseband, ruining 500,000 iPhones before AT&T implemented a filter, how much money do you think Apple is going to have to spend in repair costs and lost future sales from the bad PR?

Filtering them means analyzing the SMS contents, right? Is that legal?

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