Apple was the first one to put all of those things together in a single package that really worked well - thats what I mean by first modern :-P
What worked for you might not have been someone else's preferred method of using a smart phone. As well polished as the iPhone was, I found many of its design implimentations worked against the way I liked to use a smart phone. And I think the fact that Symbian (amongst others) outsold iOS for the first few years of the iPhone's life would suggest that I wasn't alone.
So I think even by that measure, it's still unfair to exclude other handsets of the same generation which were just as popular.
But then I guess history is written by the victors, not the other pioneers who've since fallen by the wayside.
edit: just to clarify. I do agree that the iPhone deserve a place in the history books because it did change the landscape significantly. But my point was that the iPhone wasn't the first phone of it's ilk (probably the best all rounder and definitely best at specific criteria, but those are point I'm enjoying discussing here). In light of that, if the iPhone deserves a place then equally the handsets that pioneered much of the technology and paradigms which Apple beautifully combined, those other handsets deserves a mention too (like how scientific papers based on original research still need to draw from the pool of existing research and thus even new theories owe credit other publications)
That's not knocking the pre-iPhone smartphones, but conceptually they were very, very different devices with very different aims, the iPhone moved the definition of a smartphone.
The first iPhone didn't even have apps like the smartphones that came before it. That's not modern. They didn't have the first touchscreen on a phone. Apple has very good marketing and that goes a long, long way when it comes to dealing with the mob.