While my poke was more of a joke, doing some testing shows some interesting things.

I just downloaded your attachment above, and preview opened it properly. Finder also shows the dimensions as 1536x2048. So while iTunes won't magically interpret the EXIF data, it looks like the underlying OS does. Now, if I tell iTunes to sync your photo out of a folder to my iPhone, it still shows up wrong. However, if I import that photo into iPhoto and sync it, the iPhone shows it properly oriented, and I never touched a rotate option inside iPhoto.

OS X has a lot of built in photo stuff at the OS level, including RAW support for the major vendors. It doesn't surprise me too much to see EXIF rotation data handled seamlessly, but it does surprise me that the handling didn't migrate to the iPhone/iPod touch OS X.