I have to agree. It's got some of the sort of unfinished feature lists that you'd expect in a 1.0 product, but is so far ahead of any of the competition in all the other things that the missing features on the iPhone aren't as annoying as the fully implemented ones on my old treo
The EDGE network data speed seems very dependent on the cell you're in. AT&T seems to be actively upgrading for higher speed. Even my cell out here at the house has been upgraded. IT started out passing the mobile data speed test at only 56k! It was like a wired modem. That was slow, luckily I have wifi at the house. But one night I was playing past my bedtime and I noticed that it was saying "no service" for almost a whole hour. When I checked in the morning again the throughput had been bumped to over 100k. In town here I've never gotten less than 175k and have seen some tests go over 250. So it's not as good as Wifi, but it's quite usable for almost everything. And as recent tests and articles have been making quite clear, the power usage of 3G chipsets is horrid still and battery life would be non-existant if they had gone with that. Those chipsets will mature and future versions will no doubt support it, but when that will happen is more up to the chipset vendors than apple I think. But I wouldn't expect it for at least a year possibly 2 or more.
All in all I'm quite happy with it still, but I am looking forward to the first software update so that they can add things like video recording and perhaps even update the email program some, though I'm not sure what I can do to get rid of the thousands of spam I get in a day that it will be able to deal with...
So I wouldn't ditch a perfectly good phone, unless you just really really wanted one
But if you're like me and the other folks here who had old phones or broken phones, getting one over the other offerings is a no brainer.
PS: the thing at duke is fascinating. I can't figure out exactly what they are claiming is happening yet. That the iPhone is sending out some flood of requests or something thats causing their access points to crash. At this moment I'm thinking it's more of a fault with the firmware of whatever access point they are using rather than an iPhone thing. I've used my iPhone on half a dozen different brands of access point here and at friends houses and never had any issues with it or them at all. I've also used it at literally a dozen different restaurants and other hotspots in town without them going down. Indeed it's easily signed onto the wifi at everywhere from Panera to Barnes & Noble.