iPhone is great, but not perfect. It's not easy to improve many things with in iPhone device and iOS country, but I got few simple ideas.
There is an easy access to search in iOS, you can either swipe to the right from main home screen or click home button ones from there. The search screen has a a small search field at the top and keyboard at the bottom, but center is just gray nothing that takes more than half of the screen. It is the perfect place for quick preferences. If you start searching, the search results will replace them, and it's totally fine because it means that you got to search screen to search and thus you do not need those preferences, but if you do, you would use them before searching.
Quick Preferences
If list is getting too long, a usual scroll bar can appear when you touch it. So the UI for that is easy, you do not need much, maybe a bar with "Quick preferences title and "Edit" button, that is all, but I think bar like that should be should only when you pull the list down. In the Preferences you can swipe a particular control to the right to mark it as a favorite, or show a little empty star next to each switch, or even better auto populate that list with the ones you toggle the most and then allow to edit it.
This is very easy to add to iOS and it would be so valuable, many geeks would praise iOS again and regular users would love that too.