Given the nightmares that other companies have had even just trying to update an OS, let alone conduct an entire rewrite, yes, that is an impressive demonstration of Apple’s technical chops and of their project management ability.

This might seem trivial but it isn’t: for people have been headscratching over quite how to implement this for 5 years or so and Apple are indeed the first people to have brought it to fruition. It’s another testament to those technical chops.

Another way of putting this is that sure, we’ve got that fingerprint thing, a better camera, a faster processor. But underneath the hood we’ve also had some very sophisticated engineering challenges met and solved. Maybe the iPhone 5s wasn’t, on the face of it, any great leap forward: but there’s no doubting Apple’s engineering and technical skills here.