It's not a "they", it's a "he". This is one dude's perspective who obviously lacked some vision. Most people who played with the iPhone when it came out knew it was going to be huge. It was just so much better than anything on the market. My guess is the writer had a bit of an anti-Apple bias based on the tone of his early paragraphs.
This is not a blog post, there was far more than one person behind this article. Which is why ignoring the browser and only saying "as well as having wireless Internet access for e-mail" vs "as well as having wireless Internet access for e-mail and web browsing" was a huge mistake.
About the January 9th demo: It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. http://gizmodo.com/the-iphones-first-demo-was-buggy-as-hell-... Note gizmodo is talking about the actual devices the demo worked fine but at the time it was far from being ready to be released.
