About two weeks ago, Apple carefully and quietly seeded review models of the iPhone to a select few. Among them: Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, David Pogue of The New York Times, Steven Levy of Newsweek and Edward C. Baig of USA Today. Each reviewer works for a major publication, is a seasoned and well-respected journalist/technology critic and has a history of saying nice things about Apple products. For reasons beyond explanation, yours truly was omitted from this list.

The reviews agree on most points, particularly the major ones: the iPhone may have a few flaws, but overall it justifies the hype and represents a breakthrough in personal communications devices. One is forced to conclude that either 1) the iPhone really is the genuine article; or 2) Steve Jobs has discovered a way to extend the range and power of his legendary Reality Distortion Field. For the uninitiated, the RDF is a term that describes Jobs’ ability to warp an audience’s perception of whatever he’s hawking such that they’ll believe it’s far more extraordinary than it actually is.

Check out what these guys are saying:

The bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge.

-- Steven Levy

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry...

-- Walt Mossberg & Katherine Boehret

The mania over Apple's iPhone launch has created stratospheric expectations that are near impossible to live up to. Yet with a few exceptions, this expensive, glitzy wunderkind is indeed worth lusting after. That's saying a lot. After months of hype, Apple has delivered a prodigy — a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset.

-- Edward C. Baig

But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”

-- David Pogue

Such sentiments will stoke further consumer desire for the iPhone, supplying Apple with still more free advertising. Back in March Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie told USA Today that he estimated the media frenzy over the iPhone had generated $400 million in free advertising. I’m no Harvard professor, but I’d wager the figure has more than doubled since then, and that’s not including the full-scale coverage the product launch will get over the weekend. It’s nearly incomprehensible: $1 billion in free advertising for a single unavailable product. Even Steve Jobs may never be able to top this.