If you lose the PIN on an iPhone you need to do a wipe and restore it from backup. You had better hope you remembered the backup password. You can't make a backup of a locked phone either.

The backup is probably easier to attack if you have it, since it doesn't have hardware imposed timeouts on password guesses. It may not be current however.

I'm not sure the backup would be much help even if you could break into it, I believe it's encrypted with the same method used to protect the keychain and is tied to the victim's Apple ID. I attempted to help a coworker restore their device with my Mac and couldn't because my iTunes was using a different Apple ID than the device and the device's backup.

There is no way to recover a phone if you lose the passcode?

If you have access to the iTunes account you can do a physical backup with iTunes and then erase and restore that backup. It won't be pin protected.

How would one connect the phone to iTunes to do this? You must enter the PIN on the phone to connect to iTunes iirc.

Not to do a backup and restore.

Not even sure what you mean by "iTunes account"?

Errr, sorry I think it's called iCloud now :P

Apple ID

Not that I know of. Like others have said you can pull a backup (but the machine backing up had to have been trusted prior or you're SOL) and then restore the phone.

Nothing's bulletproof but the iPhone is the most trustworthy IMHO.

I believe this is to deter theft.

I've locked out my galaxy s6 using the wrong password and it just wiped and reinstalled by itself. Then allowed me to restored everything that was on cloud backup.

Nope. I've been there, did resonable research and had to start over.