It didn't take him three days to port all of the cruft from OpenGL 1.3 to Open GL ES; it took him three days to port the precise calls and precise semantics he relied upon in OpenGL 1.3 to OpenGL ES, and even then he punted on some of it.
The latter is a far, far cry from the former. The former is basically what a modern OpenGL (non-ES) driver does to support all of the legacy cruft on modern hardware. Recall that the OpenGL API is an API for a state machine. All of those layers of cruft built up over the years have incredibly arcane state interactions, are a bitch to support, and are why modern OpenGL (non-ES) drivers have gotten rather quite bloated.
Edit: to tackle the second part of your comment:
> perhaps it suggests that this API wasn't in any way damaging to the new system and could have been left in place originally?
The Immediate Mode calls he complains about not being there? They were "removed" (never introduced) way back in OpenGL ES 1.0, which IIRC originally debuted in 2003.
It's a pretty big stretch to argue that because reimplementing Immediate Mode on top of OpenGL ES doesn't have a crushing performance penalty on 2012's iPhone, it wouldn't have been a problem on what passed for mobile hardware back in 2003.
(which is ignoring the fact that even if the performance back then wouldn't have been garbage, taking the opportunity to make breaking changes and throw out cruft for an API that wasn't expected to host legacy apps was absolutely the right move)
The latter is a far, far cry from the former. The former is basically what a modern OpenGL (non-ES) driver does to support all of the legacy cruft on modern hardware. Recall that the OpenGL API is an API for a state machine. All of those layers of cruft built up over the years have incredibly arcane state interactions, are a bitch to support, and are why modern OpenGL (non-ES) drivers have gotten rather quite bloated.
Edit: to tackle the second part of your comment:
> perhaps it suggests that this API wasn't in any way damaging to the new system and could have been left in place originally?
The Immediate Mode calls he complains about not being there? They were "removed" (never introduced) way back in OpenGL ES 1.0, which IIRC originally debuted in 2003.
It's a pretty big stretch to argue that because reimplementing Immediate Mode on top of OpenGL ES doesn't have a crushing performance penalty on 2012's iPhone, it wouldn't have been a problem on what passed for mobile hardware back in 2003.
(which is ignoring the fact that even if the performance back then wouldn't have been garbage, taking the opportunity to make breaking changes and throw out cruft for an API that wasn't expected to host legacy apps was absolutely the right move)