Hardly. There was a WinMo phone with similar print quality PPI back in 2007, and an LG phone back in 2008 with even higher PPI than the iPhone 4.
1) they were not IPS but certainly cheap TNs. Very different price and outcome.
2) they were not built with the "zero gap between the glass and LCD so stuff looks like popping out" tecnique
This display, whatever you may call it (Retina Display or just a gorgeous IPS display), raises the bar in the mobile device display field. And the industry will have to try to catch up.
True. It's not like people really notice pixels on modern phones during real world activities. But the overall result maybe will be affected....especially for fonts.....In addition, many other phones are "retinal" if held just a few more inches away from your face. (And even that's not required if your eyes aren't perfect.)
The point is, the original iPhone's resolution was very low compared to a lot of other phones. As many of us have noted here before, it was very noticeable going from a WVGA phone back to an iPhone.
BTW, did you know that most of the WVGA displays nowadays (namely, amoled and super-amoled made by SMD) use a Pentile matrix with 33% less subpixel than a PROPER WVGA resolution? They're supposed to be 33% less "sharp" than a real WVGA, it's like they're interlaced (and this causes a series of issues sometime). So the 960 x 640 iphone screen will certainly put to shame those "false" WVGA displays. (the "false" applies to SMD amoleds, not LCDs like Evo 4G or Droid)
In depth:
http://blog.javia.org/nexus-one-display-and-subpixel-pattern/
http://www.displaymate.com/Nexus_One_ShootOut.htm
http://www.displayblog.com/2010/01/20/nexus-one-pentile-matrix-oled-display/