>>66
[citation needed]
What you're saying does sound mostly true for the environment. You are correct that doing intelligent asynchronous texture swapping is probably the most difficult issue in creating rich environments given the low texture memory of an iPhone 4 compared to its screen size.
But lots of iPhone games have non-static shadows with moving lights and such (especially racing games), so just because Carmack didn't demonstrate it there doesn't mean he can't do it. Also, the characters in that video looked way too smoothly shaded; they are almost certainly normal-mapped. It's a relatively cheap way of making a dozen box-shaped polygons look like an awesomely detailed mesh, and I guarantee they will be using it for characters on the iPhone.