We already knew this, or is this just interesting notes from Tony's discussion?
If you read about Project Purple, Steve fought hard to make Apple an NVMO, but someone finally got through his thick skull the mind numbing costs of building much less maintaining that kind of network.
Then he wanted CDMA, but GSM adoption was 3-4x that and would cripple the iPhone's market potential. But the argument raged for over a year because CDMA is a newer tech and Apple could be the company to expand the CDMA market by leveraging its customer base as the adoption increasing element. What ended it was Cingular buying AT&T and Jobs fell in love with the idea of using the oldest American phone company name as a huge draw to the nascent product. AT&T created the phone system, and so it was fate for the iPhone to be on it.
I don't know if he was aware, maybe the engineers were, but AT&T created UNIX and the fork of Version 4 became BSD, the foundation for Darwin. Darwin is the base layer for MacOS X and all of its forks, including iOS.
And iirc, Steve got embarassed in front of a Cingular exec because he demanded the iPhone to be all aluminum and the radio was useless, hence the black plastic passthrough on the back of the 2G prototype and eventual launch model.