I think the iphone had two innovations that moved the industry forward: (1) a first-class finger-driven interface and (2) a desktop-class browser optimized for mobile viewing instead of a dedicated mobile browsing engine.
Android would probably have gotten the high-quality browser with or without the iphone, but the touch interface wasn't likely to happen in isolation. The notion that the way to improve the UI of mobile devices was to make it much less precise is preposterous, and it took apple to show people the way.
So yes apple did have an impact, but from the context of what the article considers meaningful, it is indeed not a very big one.
Android would probably have gotten the high-quality browser with or without the iphone, but the touch interface wasn't likely to happen in isolation. The notion that the way to improve the UI of mobile devices was to make it much less precise is preposterous, and it took apple to show people the way.
So yes apple did have an impact, but from the context of what the article considers meaningful, it is indeed not a very big one.