What you see on the screen of your iPhone is almost always a hierarchy of views.
When you look at, say, your inbox in Mail, you're seeing a bunch of views. There's a big containing view.[1] Within that, there's a navigation bar view, a table view, and a toolbar view. Within the navigation bar view, there's a button view on each side and a label view in the middle. Inside the table view, there are a bunch of table cell views, and each of those cells has several label views. The toolbar has five button views. I could go further and talk about the views inside those buttons and so on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
The view above any given view is its superview; the views below it are its subviews. So a table cell view has a table view as its superview and a bunch of label views as its subviews. The top view, the one that has all the other views inside it, is called the root view.
Each view has its own drawing surface. The rectangle formed by that drawing surface is called the frame. The frame of a view is relative to the frame of its containing view. So if one of our table cell's label subviews has its frame at (0,0), that means it will be in the table cell's top left corner, even if the cell is halfway down the screen.
When you're writing a view controller, self.view is that root view I mentioned earlier; all the other views are subviews of that one (or subviews of its subviews, etc.). One of the features of a view controller is that it automatically resizes its self.view to fit the screen. (The available area will be smaller in the middle of a phone call: the status bar is twice as high then, so there's less space for your app. It will also be smaller if your view controller is being managed by a navigation controller or tab bar controller, but that's a different story.) But just because you resize its root view doesn't mean that the root view's subviews will automatically resize. To do that, you need to set their autoresizing mask (a property which tells the view how it should react when its superview changes size):
someView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth
| UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight;
(There's a graphical way to set up the autoresizing mask in Interface Builder—click the ruler icon in the inspector window and look at the "Autosizing" section.)
Even that's not enough, though, if someView isn't the right size to start with. To do that, adjust its frame before you add it as a subview of self.view:
someView.frame = CGRectMake(
0, // all the way to the left
0, // all the way at the top
self.view.frame.size.width, // same width as the root view
self.view.frame.size.height, // same height too
);
So why would you ever use subviews if you have to do all this twiddling that the root view does for you? Simple: you can only have one root view, but one view is almost never enough for what you need to do. If you really need only one view, of course, you can just set it as the root view and go on your merry way, but chances are, things are more complicated than that.
[1] I'm simplifying a bit here, but that's fine for right now.