My iPhone is most definitely the coolest thing that I've bought in quite a while. I have a friend who works for Apple, so I paid $254 for it. I wonder how many people who are saying it sucks have spent any time playing with one.
I definitely wasn't too impressed when I heard about it - but back when they first came out I thought iPods weren't as impressive as the Samsung MP3 that I had at the time too. But once I used the iPhone for a while, I was pretty impressed. And I keep finding more neat things about it. It's just nice to have a very readable, handheld HTML (not WAP) web-browser in my pocket. My daughter and I were talking about the Civil War over lunch and I couldn't remember some details - I got out my iPhone, hit Safari, flipped it sideways to make it easier to read and we scrolled through the Wikipedia entry.
I don't get excited about all things Apple - in fact, this iPhone is the first thing from Apple that I've ever bought (I won my iPod) - but they did a good job with it. Yes, 3G would be nice. Yes, better flash browser support would help. But the battery is user-changeable (it's just hard to change), and I think the keyboard on it - particularly when it's flipped sideways (for web-browsing) is actually pretty good. My complaints are the size (it's too big for me to sit down with it in my back pocket), the battery life (it's about 5 days, but I use WiFi a lot), the lack of flash support (a lot of pages don't work), the audio quality out of the microphone on the phone isn't great, and the weight - it's heavy even for it's size.
I promptly unlocked it when I bought it and I'm using our $70/month unlimited data plan for both my wife and I ($50 family plan + $20 unlimited data plan + T-Mobile WiFi). Much better deal than AT&T offers. The guys at the T-Mobile store thought it was pretty cool.