Last night I spent some time talking to Gary Rosenzweig of Mac Most about the iPhone.

Now Gary and I don’t see eye-to-eye about Apple. He runs a popular Mac fan site. I have a grudge with Apple that goes back to their crappy support for games 15 years ago when the Mac was the best multimedia machine on the planet, includes the time that the morons at the Apple store refused to install memory in my machine purchased at the store that they’d promised to put in for free, on through charging me $100 bucks a year to patch their feline-inspired operating systems and for Steve Jobs just generally being annoying.

I’m a reformed Mac convert. Left the Mac fold a few years ago and haven’t looked back.

I also have been critical of the iPhone and what I see as Apple’s greedy desire to be the next Sony rather than take care of improving the personal computer.

But Gary convinced me that I might be wrong this time and that the iPhone just might unlock a whole new world of portable gaming.

With a big, bright touch screen, a tilt sensor and a decent graphics processor, the iPhone looks a lot like a game machine. But Gary’s point was that Apple was promising an open application environment and a lot of cool multimedia tools that look to make the iPhone into a target platform for game developers.

I tend to believe Gary about this sort of thing because he’s a successful author and game developer. He knows a lot about making games. And when he gets excited about a development environment, well, that’s a reason to think there’s something going on.

Plus, I got to play a little game where you tilt the iPhone and roll a marble through a maze. It was some simple little download and wasn’t that exciting on its own. But it did show that the Apple device could be a pretty cool game environment.

Still, I’m not holding my breath. To really make the iPhone a viable game platform, a few things need to happen:

1. Apple needs to make good on its promise to open up iPhone development to a wide range of developers.  Sure, the bigs can port their portable products. Big deal. Innovation and growth is going to come from small shops and indies willing to take a risk and come up with cool new gaming apps, specially designed for the iPhone.
2. Apple needs to make good on its promise to sell all this new software through iTunes, and make it easy for people to buy stuff and even download games for free
3. Apple needs to make good on a profit sharing that doesn’t gouge the little developer.
4. Apple needs not to get in bed with a few select publishers and choke off everyone else.
5. Steve Jobs needs to stay out of the way. It’s hard to deny his skill and insight in certain product areas. But Jobs does not get gaming. Not even a little bit.