Heck, when the Zen Garden was first released, you couldn't even browse the web on a Blackberry. 1024x768 monitors were a luxury. 760px wide was all you could count on for a browser window once you accounted for window edges and scrollbars on the average user's 800x600 monitor (a few years later as 1024px monitors became more common, a 960px site width became the standard); and I had co-workers who were still getting by with 640x480.
I was fighting my coworkers with 1440 monitors to make sure we still worked on 768 width (plenty for 800px + scrollbar, or portrait on the brand new iPad). UI people like to maximize negative space in their mockups and it's not uncommon for them to use extremely short example text to emphasize that effect. Like how your living room looked so big until you put all of your crap into it.
And the thing is, even if you had a 16XX monitor, who wants to maximize a tool that you might be transcribing data in or out of? I might actually need two windows side by side to facilitate that work.
