Whilst I agree with your main point, I have to nitpick your aside about running iOS on older devices. When I tried iOS 4.0 on my 3G (and the reason I'm now running 3.1.3 again) the UI would frequently completely freeze for several seconds. That can't be explained away as poorly-tuned animations.
Have you ever tried it on Yahoo? They wouldn't let me set my email address to yahoo@mydomain a few years ago, claiming that the "email owner" had blocked this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t213wkajdz5753k/yahoolies.png?dl=0