One of the signature visuals of the iPhone OS is the simple half-gloss rounded rectangle shape every icon takes. When the phone came out a couple years ago, I had initial reservations about how this template might encourage developers to make every icon look too similar with regards to creativity. I tried to deduce a good reason why they might have chosen that route, and I concluded that perhaps they a.) wanted to lower the barriers by making icon development easier for developers, and b.) wanted to prevent certain arrangements of contrasting icon shapes from making any particular sequence look strange on a grid. There wasn't an answer in the Developer Connection Human Interface Guidelines either, but it did seem to suggest that developers were supposed to create non-glossy square images for (I assume) to be later processed for uniform corners and gloss treatment.
Nevertheless, I love the challenge of working with restrictions such as the rounded template, so I was struck in the very beginning over how someone used the rounded corners as the rounded edges of a retro television set for the YouTube icon, and then again just last week over the imeem icon using the tapered edges of an audio cassette.
This is not to say that people haven't broken out of the rounded boxes mentality (see the WordFu icon), but to maintain the exact template shape to make it work with your design is the best kind.
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