Put you phone in Landscape mode, the phone will still zoom on those areas, but if you put the phone in landscape mode then you will not see text over buttons like in the picture.
Compared to what? pretty much every current mobile platform is using a browser based off of WebKit which is what Safari uses for rendering. It would be nice if Apple added text search and a few other features, but I think they will probably come sometime soon.
Android, the upcoming new Blackberry OS, Web OS are all based on the same rendering technology.