It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.
The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.
"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".
You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.
Always seemed to me like RAM value is much more irrelevant on phones since every app is sandboxed and uses APIs for background operations.
RAM is also always consuming battery, so there are reasons to minimize it. I wonder what the RAM usage efficiency is between iOS and Android in real-world, installed-app-usage usecases.