Fashion is fickle. I'm looking at getting a HTC Hero because a) everyone has an iPhone and b) managing my music in iTunes has been annoying since I did a clean install of Mac OS X.
And it has 5MP camera that will make iPhone owners jealous (although not me - I had N82 with 5MP and Xenon flash for 1.5 years now), which Gruber seems to imply is needed to gain from Apple. Frankly I think he is wrong. What's needed is as capable device and slightly lower total cost of ownership. Hero comes close IMHO.