100% agree. I used a touchscreen kiosk back in 1982 at EPCOT. It wasn't resistive, could have been capacitive, probably was infrared or surface-wave.

And thus it is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

You're making the "graham invented the telephone so there was nothing invented to make the cellphone" error.

Except it's not irrelevant, because the user doesn't care whether it's capacitive, infra-red, or little gnomes perched on top of the screen translating your finger movements into magic spells. Apple didn't invent capacitive screens, nor did they invent multitouch. They packaged them cleverly and used what leverage they had at the time to force the price down.

Right and Graham invented the telephone so there was no inventions going into making the cellphone.

There were phone handsets with buttons on before cordless phones, so as far as the UI goes, there was little major invention initially.

The main inventive requirement in touchscreen phones is in making small, thin, cheap touchscreen modules. The UI concepts that then run on those kinds of devices have however been the subject of design studies for decades before that, and have been implemented in various forms on commercial touchscreen installations.

Also, much of the graphic polish of many of these devices seem to draw a direct lineage to stuff like the old praystation series of websites by Joshua Davis and his experiments with tsunami menus and inertial scrolling elements.