I still hate touch screens lol.  Probably has something to do with the fact that I'm one of the few who are willing to put in the work of learning a difficult user interface in the interest of efficiency down the road.  Consumers are fickle and want everything *now*.  It makes sense, as you said, in hindsight that the iPhone won so resoundingly.  My father could barely turn a PC on and couldn't see any reason to own a mobile phone, but I'm certain that if he'd ever had the chance to use an iPhone, he would have been expertly navigating the UI in about exactly 30 seconds and would have been excited about the capability of many of its features.

Your broader point is well taken too.  I have a tendency to mine deep down in a lot of crap data, and it has cost me a lot of money investing, as well as time with other things.  Kurzweil is very good at explaining why large leaps in technology aren't really what they seem.  He's also great at sorting through the noise and only seeing relevant data, because like Musk, he's not only a technophile, he actually builds a lot of the stuff he's talking about.

When I read the comment about technological leaps (as I've heard others talk about before), I instantly thought of the Wright brothers and how they by themselves invented the first heavier-than-air flying machine, but then I got to thinking more about them.  The only major leap I can see that they made was in aerodynamics.  Everything else in the airplane was built on the incremental improvements of other technologies.  The internal combustion engine, the materials and design elements necessary to lighten one, the materials required to create a light frame, which they adapted from bicycle technology.

They invented the first airplane propeller that very nearly matches the same efficiency of modern propellers cut from CNC, but even that was an adaptation from marine technology.  The wind tunnel was also their invention, but it was really just an artificial environment for what they were already doing on the beaches of North Carolina using natural wind.  They wouldn't have actually needed it if they hadn't had a perceived need for secrecy on the final product.

Which leads me to the final reason why they didn't make such a great leap, even in aerodynamics.  They were a small part of a larger community of scholars who were working on this problem at the time.  They had even published papers within the scientific community they were drawing from, even though they lacked the formal education usually required to participate.  If they hadn't succeeded in putting all of the necessary technologies together to make an airplane possible, someone else would have in short order.