The first post is interesting as it seems exactly like what I experienced on my iPhone (see the thread I started called Poor WiFi range).
In my case I have two laptops, one a few years old with not-so-good WiFi range and the other only a few months old with great WiFi range. My iPhone, although a bit better than when I first started that thread, is not as good range-wise compared to either of the laptops. And I had to swap APs to make it work even acceptably, something I won't be able to do at most hot spots

.
But the two replies to the thread I started seemed to indicate the iPhone is great with WiFi range, which mine clearly is not. It might prove to be acceptable, but at this point not great.
OTOH, I don't want to go through the exercise of returning it if they all work that way. And for sure there is a software bug when it comes to DNS with certain routers (i.e., one shouldn't have to override DNS settings).
--
Mike