What I find iconic is that if Apple don't revolutionize the world on each iteration then Everything is Terrible, whereas when Microsoft announce their next cycle it's success is based on whether we can do what we can already do.

the 4S isn't a monumental upgrade as far as feature set - and bear in mind that Apple have had failures, just that the market was so small that no-one noticed. But again, here we have Apple unable to meet/beat their own bar with a single app - a failure, I suppose. The hardware, however, looks like a significant upgrade, but maybe that's too early to tell.