Hugh, you need to open up your eyes. Do you always make ridiculous generalizations like that? Then again, you were the one going on about how allofmp3.com passes on royalties to copyright holders
I think you should watch the keynote first so that if you're going to bash it, at least you know what deficiencies it has first. And yes, please go ahead and short it. You were probably one of the people shorting it when it hit its lows earlier this past summer as well. Record breaking revenues on existing product lines, a completely new revenue stream and who knows what else they have up their sleeves. That's ok, it makes it more interesting for me when shorts are forced to cover. (disclosure: I only daytrade AAPL, don't hold a position)
As far as 3G goes .. their initial market is going to be in North America. Why would they offer expensive 3G hardware when NOBODY offers 3G service in NA? Duh. The underlying hardware is all there and to upgrade it to 3G would be fairly straightforward for when they want to move into Europe/Asia/Japan. Their current target is 10M units for the year. That's nothing! They'll sell a lot more than that just in North America, and then they can come out with a separate version for other regions that support UMTS.
Some of the benefits (other than bandwidth) that people often associate with 3G are things like talking/emailing etc at the same time. You can do all that on this phone. All the underlying protocols are packet-based anyways.
The phone is also not slow like GPRS which typically varies from 8k-56k. It comes with EDGE which gives typical rates around 180k/s. Most UMTS (3G) phones give typical rates of around 350k/s, although there are new advances there which can give far higher bandwidth. Anyways, you can't compare EDGE to GPRS -- the experience is like night and day. For example I use my EDGE BlackBerry to connect my laptop (over bluetooth) and can surf the net with very reasonable performance.
As NsXMas pointed out, this phone isn't targetting corporate users (although I think they should!). Anyways, you CAN connect to corporate Exchange servers using IMAP, and it also supports push-IMAP so it can behave like a blackberry. If anything, the full support for HTML/images/richtext in the emails and the larger/higher resolution/denser screen makes it a hell of a lot better for email than the BlackBerry 8700g that I have right now.
As far as sync'ing goes, I suspect that they'll use bluetooth for that. That makes the most sense, especially since Macs have been shipping standard with Bluetooth for a long time now.
With regards to putting your own software on there -- Apple has stated that developers should get in touch with their Developer Relations Team. To me this sounds like they don't want to open up the specs to the whole world, will force developers to sign NDA's, and might even screen the software for quality. I don't think the door for outside development is closed at this point.
The biggest reason that I can see for people not liking this is going to be lack of tactile feedback. They've put in an ingenious multi-touch gesture recognition system into the phone, but only actual use will us how well it works in practice. A lot of the other devices that have gone for full-screen interfaces (eg. Pronto remote) have had the lack of tactile feedback presented as the biggest negative. Then again, they didn't support the kind of gesture recognition this does. Bottom line is that I have yet to use a modern phone that is easy to operate even for the main thing that it's supposed to do which is simply talk. Conferencing, Voice Mail, etc. are all a pain in the ass. It looks like Apple has solved these issues, but only actual use will determine that.
Personally, I can't wait to dump my BlackBerry and get one of these.