Of course it's marketing, and Apple certainly isn't alone in selling stuff with hyperbole.
What I think the grandparent was getting to isn't pointing out the silliness of the ad copy, but that the actual device being advertised is an underwhelming incremental improvement. This is less of an improvement on the 4S than the 4S was over the 4, and the 4S was uniformly dinged for being a disappointing (most of the best new stuff was software) iteration.
Really, this isn't even to ding Apple: smartphones are becoming commdities. The years of rapid evolution are behind us. The Android market is seeing similar pressure, as the most recent phones all more or less look and work identically.
I'm deeply underwhelmed. I was half-expecting something revolutionary, maybe haptics. Something that would make the iPhone stand out from Android. But I don't see anything new that would make me give up my existing Galaxy Nexus. It's just a big load of meh.
Sure, there was some rapid change as things like Android and WinCE dumped their old-style geek-centric interfaces and moved toward a more iPhone-ish consumer-centric approach. But after "the big switch" each one has had a similarly deliberate schedule of updates.
The original iPhone was a clear discontinuity: doubled the screen size, relied solely on a capacitive touchscreen and on-screen keyboard. The iOS market that arrived with the iPhone 3G was the first of its kind and a huge hit. The arrival of a serious GPU in the iPhone 3GS likewise changed the game for slick native UIs and all smartphones since have had one. The 800x480 resolution on the Nexus One enabled new kinds of apps (for the first time matching the anglular pixel size available to a person sitting very closet to a monitor) and the Retina display in the iPhone 4 completed that process. Most recently the dual core A9 SoCs in phones like the Atrix and 4S have become requirements.
Note that all of those features are required for a modern smartphone, and almost all of them were driven first by an iPhone release.
The iPhone 5 just isn't like that. There's nothing "new" here that we'll expect to see later on in other phones. It's just more of the same, but slightly better.
What I think the grandparent was getting to isn't pointing out the silliness of the ad copy, but that the actual device being advertised is an underwhelming incremental improvement. This is less of an improvement on the 4S than the 4S was over the 4, and the 4S was uniformly dinged for being a disappointing (most of the best new stuff was software) iteration.
Really, this isn't even to ding Apple: smartphones are becoming commdities. The years of rapid evolution are behind us. The Android market is seeing similar pressure, as the most recent phones all more or less look and work identically.