The display was really impressive for the era, resistive touch, backlit etc.; this is two years before the Palm Pilot launched.

Most people would not have thought "underwhelming", and displays no better than that were commonplace in really popular devices for the next five years, including in the Palm V and Vx.

The problem these early smartphones had with their audience was lack of precedent. The Newton launched the year before but almost nobody would have seen them in the wild. Maybe geeky people had seen the Tandy/Casio Zoomer in print ads or Radio Shack.

Devices of this kind that launched after people started seeing Palm Pilots everywhere had an easier time.

That, I think, is why it is sold the way it is in this ad; few people would have had any reason to know how they worked or what they could offer, so "features-first" advertising would not really have reached a wide enough market. This kind of advertising was really commonplace for computers.