It's weird and slightly pathetic that it took the iPhone to make people discover that digital painting exists. The technology to make "smeary" paintings has been used in advertising for years. This New York Times article (and apparently the art editor of the New Yorker) are suddenly all agog that it can be done, because someone did one on an iPhone. See also this discussion on Paddy Johnson's blog of David Hockney's similar amazing discovery (and this followup).
When it's about advertising a marvelous, life changing Apple (TM) product suddenly everyone wakes up to the world around them.