Except the fact that circumcision cuts into important veins (blood return) and possibly an artery (in the frenulum; blood supply). This alters the normal vascularity and ultimately the physiology of the penis, forcing a complex healing by putting capillaries into different duty. This affects the amount of blood that reaches the meatus -- likely an important component of meatal stenosis and the chief reason almost all intact men have functional meatal lips and most circumcised men don't. The meatal lips are the culmination of the raphe and are direct beneficiaries of the frenular artery. The lips, of course, are what close tightly together to keep pathogens out of the urethra. Another marvel of nature.
Also, the veins running through the foreskin ensure that in its relaxed, forward position the prepuce is not just a blanket, but a heated blanket. This in turn regulates the temperature of the glans, which in turn helps determine how close to the body the testicles ride (cool=closer to body=less sperm produced). Most circumised males have a consistently colder glans than intact males; some have an uncomfortably cold glans, particularly after sitting for long periods or after sports.
The efficiency of bloodflow through the foreskin & glans is a factor in proper tumescence and detumescence, though the body works mightily to overcome the vascular obstacles posed by the severing of a significant chunk of the venous system of the penis through circumcision. The alternate "mapping" the body is forced to do after iatrogenic injury is a marvel of nature, but never quite as effective as the original.
One of the foreskin's primary functions is to serve as an "early alert" system to tumescence; it is ultra-sensitive to any change in diameter of the glans and lets a male know well in advance of any change. Obviously, without a foreskin there is no monitoring of the glans and some circumcised males joke that they are well on their way to erection before they realize it. Not a big problem in most settings, but also not the way the body was designed to work.
The skin of the penis is unique on all the body, in that it is not attached to the underlying fascia. You can actually roll the tip of the foreskin all the way down to the pubic bone (depending on the elasticity of the frenulum). The body achieves this through a complexly-evolved nerve system that does not have the nerve endings run down from layer to layer as on the rest of the body; but rather, laterally in a specialized structure that allows complete freedom of the gliding top layer of skin. This means that the nerve endings are in fact attached to the body only at their extreme ends -- the pubis, and where the foreskin doubles back again and "ends" at the sulcus behind the glans. Since the rested foreskin is doubled-over, any cut that "shortens" it in this doubled state actually removes a cylindrical section from this sleeve, short-circuiting the complex nerve structure. Again, the body springs into action to repair this injury by having nerve endings attach over time to whatever nerves are nearby; but the section of the brain that corresponds to the nerve endings severed through circumcision go "black" and remain that way.
Circumcision, as a wound, also lays down a complex and irrreversible system of fibroblasts at the site of the circumcision scar, between layers of skin and the underlying fascia. Invisible to the naked eye, this dense web of cells defeats the purpose of the unique outer skin structure of the penis by creating an "anchor" which limits the mobility of the shaft skin and its gliding mechanism so important to sex.
So perhaps these articles report that both circumcised and intact penises look and function the same way, but they fail to explain what is really happening. You can have an Andrew Wyeth original painting or you can have a cardboard poster of it that you bought at the National Gallery gift shop, and they do same same thing in your hallway; but they're not the same.
I never knew the whole organ was so complex. I'm so glad I live in Europe where they don't routinely mutilate the genitals of babies of either sex.
