I had the original iPhone on release day...loved it but felt that it had some major faults (one that had nothing to do with Apple, but with Cingular not allowing MMS messages which was so annoying, especially with such an amazing (at the time) screen for pictures and what not.
That iPhone actually fell out of my pocket on the Batman roller coaster at six flags and got completely destroyed, so I had to buy another one...this time though I got lucky, and bought it right before the 3G release, and AT&T allowed trade ins of the original iPhone for full retail price (because of the time in which it was purchased being so close to the next variants release)...so I ended up trading it back in to AT&T and got TWO 3G's (one for me and one for my wife, who at the time was a blackberry loyalist).