What a joke most of the posters in this thread are.
Consumer Reports doesn't hate the iPhone 4. In fact, they think it's the best phone on the market. But once they thoroughly tested the antenna problem they found it to have a serious enough hardware flaw to not recommend it until Apple fixed the problem.
They and Anandtech both did testing that found all phones suffer from some level of attenuation, nobody doubts this, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that the iPhone 4's external antenna design causes their attenuation problems to be more severe than the norm. Bare contact with the antenna is bad (making it worse than other phones) but combine it with the fact that you don't need a death grip (like other phones) but only 1 finger to create the problem, and you have a major flaw that Apple should address.
What Apple did yesterday was nothing short of straight propaganda.
They said: All phones suffer attenuation.
The truth: the iPhone 4 suffers more from attenuation.
They ignored the core issue completely and are now spewing PR propaganda and guess what? The other companies are now fighting back with statements. Apple F'd up on this and I expect RIM, HTC and others to now do thorough testing that will expose raw data showing the truth.
I'm not going to act like the iPhone 4 is completely unusable but I have no doubt that Apple crossed an acceptable threshold when they chose this antenna design. Watch the next iPhone not even have an external antenna.
Well said.