"there are many charismatic people around who can make their teams really believe in a mission without any fact at all to backup this belief,"

I believe your perspective is in error when you get to the part about "without any fact at all to backup this belief". I believe that Steve Jobs was certainly charismatic, and probably one of the great people at getting his team to believe in a mission-- but I don't think this is "reality distortion", nor do I believe this was "without any fact at all to backup this belief".

In fact, I believe the reason he was so good was because he did have facts-- facts that the mainstream may not have been aware of-- but that were true. The thing is, many people still dispute these facts. (Eg: "The iPad is just a big iPod touch" disputes the killer app of the iPad, but the reality of iPad sales shows that they were wrong.)

Lets take some key products where Jobs got his team to believe in a mission to make something that was significantly different:

The Macintosh, NeXTSTEP & the iPhone.

For the Macintosh: The facts: Most computers were difficult to use. Apple had strong experience with this for the apple // which was command line based. The Mac team went to Xerox and saw some of the key technology working and saw how it was more efficient (technology that Apple had a license to with the deal). Another Fact: The Apple // was a very integrated computer for its time, but a competing company (I forget the name at the time) had gone one step further and integrated the monitor with the computer. Thus the mission of the Macintosh: An integrated computer with the footprint of a phonebook that was sold like an appliance and that anyone could use because of its GUI, was not a distortion of reality, nor did it lack "any fact at all" to back up the mission. All the key elements existed elsewhere, though of course the schedule was completely unrealistic (but back then the fact that software was always late was not as widely accepted as it is now.)

NeXTSTEP: The facts: Unix is powerful, multi-tasking is powerful. Object Oriented Software allows for component re-use. The mission: Build a unix workstation at reasonable cost that allows for rapid application development using object oriented software. True, NeXTSTEP was the first OO operating system (like the Mac was the first real GUI) and so there was some leap of faith to think they could do it or that it could be successful, but this is not based on a distortion of reality. Pre-emptive multitasking is really useful, and OO can allow for code re-use, and in the NeXT environment (and now OS X and iOS it really is a force multiplier for developers.) I don't see how he distorted reality or the facts there-- except, again, he set a deadline for delivery based on the fact that they were a startup. The deadline was unrealistic, because software takes too long and they missed it.

The iPhone: The facts: The phone market was a mess. People hated their phones. (I did some research in this area, and found the churn rate was something like %83 and the dissatisfaction with ones phone was something like %70, though I may have those numbers reversed.) The software market for phones was locked down by carriers. The interfaces were terrible- often just a numeric keypad and if you had a full qwerty keyboard it made the phone unwieldy. A touch interface would be better, obviously ,right? Well, Apple bought Fingerworks. They knew touch interfaces could work because Fingerworks invented them. People hating their phones, the software being locked down by carriers, bad interfaces and limited usability due to physical keyboards are all things that you can't really dispute. There was a leap of faith in believing a completely touch based phone would work, and they spent many years working on it (and the iPad project which was started earlier). And again the timing for when they thought they could ship it was unrealistic and they had to bring in engineers from the OS X side of things to make their date. Did Jobs distort reality to get the team to work on the iPhone? I don't see why we should believe that. Did he get them to work on a mission without "any facts at all" to backup the belief that it could work? I don't think so-- that the phone industry was broken was obvious to a lot of people. I myself worked on a completely voice driven phone project in the late 1990s, but stopped due to being unable to get sufficient horsepower in a battery powered device to do the voice recognition.

In all three cases the market need was pretty clear. The technology precedents were visible. Both of these are facts that back up the belief in the mission. Neither of these rely on a distortion of reality.

All projects for new products require some faith. But getting people to believe something is possible, even when it hasn't been done before, doesn't mean necessarily doing it without any fact,s and in these cases, the facts to support the project were there.

If his crime is making people believe that the software won't take as long as it actually does, I can't fault him, and to be honest, he seems to be no worse in that regard than any manager I've ever had. (many of whom were deliberate about it.)

At Microsoft, for instance, when I worked there it was common practice to name the next release of windows something like "Windows 93" so that the employees all knew it had to come out in 1993, even though management knew it wouldn't be ready til 1997. Didn't want them to slack off thinking they had 4 years to get it done!