All these photos also seem to be taken at a further distance at a higher zoom with the digicam. Use 2x mode on iphone and step back a bit and the perspective/distortion should be similar. 12mp is still plenty. Also, they didn't mention if they turned off face smoothing on the iphone.

Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.

There isn't an "accurate photo" that you can objectively adjudicate. All digital camera outputs are highly processed to get appealing results. The fact that you think Real Tone on the Google Pixel was "a big stink" only tells us about you, not Google.