The products that break the game open aren't playing the specs game or the iteration game -- that comes later, if they're lucky. It's about vision. It's right place, right time. It's execution. And it's super rare.
These product don't always look revolutionary on day one. In fact, they can even be pretty hard to spot at first blush. But they're always easy to identify in hindsight -- once they've fundamentally changed how we do something, once they've caused us to question how we ever went without them.
But the buzz inevitably wears off, and the long haul sets in. We remember the magic of our first WiFi router or microSD card -- but now that stuff has become totally pedestrian. The game-changers make way for mature new product categories, which in turn produce mature new products.
When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was Siri. From my experience, it has a luke-warm reputation right now among my friends...but I think down the road we'll see it become a much bigger part of our lives.