Among the laundry list of other features Steve Jobs demonstrated this morning on the brand new 4G iPhone was a secondary, front-facing video camera, allowing users to video-chat with each other.

Amazing! Straight out of the Jetsons!

Or, honestly, not so amazing. At least not to me. While I appreciated the wow factor intellectually, Jobs’ demo didn’t leave me much viscerally impressed. After all, Jess and I already video chat whenever one of us in on the road, using Google Video on our respective MacBooks.

This afternoon, however, I was truly bowled over. I sent a two-page fax. And, as happens each time I use one of those machines, seeing paper going in one end of a fax machine in my office and knowing that a copy was coming out the other end of a fax machine somewhere hundreds of miles away completely boggled my mind.

Obviously, as compared to even plain-text email, the fax machine and its simple transmission protocol is roughly akin to cave painting. Which, perhaps, is why it so impresses me. I can just barely comprehend the engineering involved in faxing, the difficulty of somehow turning my paper into a series of screeches that another machine can translate back to scribbles on a page.

Whereas by the time I think about email – or certainly video conferencing – my mind can’t even begin to grasp the complexity.

As Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indestinguishable from magic. Which, perhaps, is the problem.

Growing up, I loved magic – learning tricks, watching magicians on TV. But magicians like David Copperfield, whose tricks (I recall seeing him walk through the Great Wall of China) were completely inscrutable, never really stuck with me.

My heart, instead, belonged to Penn & Teller. The plucky pair would gleefully give away the secret to their tricks, then re-perform them. And, the second time through, I’d be doubly impressed, marvelling at the skill and dexterity I suddenly realized that pulling off the tricks required.

So, perhaps, to really appreciate that 4G video chatting, I’d simply need to spend some time puzzling through the technology involved. Apple engineers, if you want to send along a crash course, feel free. And if you really want to wow me, you can send it via fax.