I just re-watched the whole Macworld 2007 keynote where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone — which is probably the Apple announcement most comparable to Microsoft’s Surface announcement — and here’s a few things I noticed.

• While it didn’t all necessarily work as it was finally delivered, all the software demoed worked, six months before the product was released. Maybe I missed something, but I didn’t see any glitches or crashes and Steve Jobs demoed pretty much everything the phone did.
• Battery life was announced (5 hours).
• Price was announced at $499 and $599 (although just three months after launch they cut the price by $200).
• In the last five minutes of the keynote, Jobs’ slide clicker failed. While stage hands scrambled, Jobs casually launched into a story about how, back in high school, he and Steve Wozniak would prank college students by screwing up the TV reception in the dorm common rooms.

There were still some questions in the air, but they basically covered every major thing you wanted to know about the phone.

On the other hand, there was five minutes of Stan Sigman reading off of cue cards. So it wasn’t all peaches and cream.

Glenn Fleishman adds:

Re 2007 keynote: Also, in a briefing right after, Joz handed me an iPhone and I had no restrictions on what I did with it for 20+ min