Yea, I hear you.. but truth be told, the iPhones EDGE connection has been pretty snappy for me. All but very image heavy pages (TGP's/MGP's) load quicker than I would expect. I have been pleasantly surprised.
Also, I have been very underwhelmed by many phones and their 3g connections. If anything has more hype than the iPhone, its the term, "3g". Theoretically they should perform ridiculously well, but in reality they suffer the same kind of latency that EDGE has, and throughput is significantly lower (usually) than what they are supposed to be able to do. Either way, I havnt missed it.
Many phones out there have such slow processors, and small amounts of ram (*ahem*
Nokia), that the bottle neck for page rendering is really the CPU, and not the network. My Nokia N80 for example, feels just as sluggish over wi-fi as it does over EDGE.
Even the iPhones youtube videos seem to load and play continuously after only a few seconds of buffering.