It's all the same issue. The only difference is that with the iPhone you have exposed metal making for very easy conductance bridging that black gap over the skin.

The Samsung has a magic sweet spot that is also very easy to cover and/or bridge if holding the phone in one hand (left hand).

There are plenty of reports of people touching the iPhone 4 without dropping the call while still dropping bars. There are plenty of reports of other phones dropping calls or with insanely crap reception.

Is the iPhone 4 perfect? Not by a long shot. My only point is that this issue is massively overhyped. Even taking into account it's Apple we're talking about, it's still all blown way overboard.

I do think that Apple played the best card possible this past week by deflecting the issue off as an industry-wide one, even if their design is the most susceptible. They could have done a better job and perhaps avoided some of the overhype by warning about possible issues framed as a "trade-off" of the new design at WWDC. But that's not characteristically Apple and to assume for a second they'd even consider having done that is absurd.

I think this story will not soon be forgotten, even though the issue is not likely to affect the next generation of products. I don't think it's going to soil the iPhone the same way as the Newton's early handwriting recognition - it was vastly improved in later versions, and to this day, I still think the Newton had better handwriting support that anything else since (especially if you compare processing power and other attributes across platforms).