Symbian and Windows Mobile supported copy/paste for a good period of time before iOS and Symbian/Windows was the standard that people expected from a smartphone.
True, but iPhone + iOS was a smoother experience in nearly every detail (from the capacitive touchscreen to intuitiveness), that people accepted the lack of copy/paste.
From what I have seen of WP7, it is nice, but not nearly the revolutionary step ahead that iOS was compared to Symbian/Windows.
The iPhone at launch was a great dumb phone with a cool touchscreen. I remember that my boss got an Iphone 2g and was pleased with the interface but he missed apps.
There are lots of people who seemingly never used a smart phone before the iPhone came out[1] and seem to think that everything that existed in iOS was always the first of its kind.
Nokia's smart phones did copy/paste fairly well and long before the iPhone even existed. Yes, the iPhone set the bar higher for many features but it was certainly not the first to do many of them.
[1] It's debatable that you could even call the first iPhone a smart phone since you were basically stuck with whatever preloaded apps came on it - though it was obviously a very good phone nevertheless.
I had a Symbian phone for three years. For three years, my two biggest complaints were "why can't I copy and paste?" and "what the heck is that pencil button for?".
