Sometimes the best ideal solution is not the one that can win in practice!

The web was and still is a very bad hypertext system (no bidirectional links, no versioning, no integrated index, no transclusion, etc.) and we are still paying this debt! But this was also the an incredible hypertext system, permission-less, decentralized, and that made it a success.

I feel that the iPhone keyboard was the same, it had to appears (including in screenshots) innocuous and "without quality" to win over users.