Its soooo easy to criticise and second guess isn't it? Maybe some of you should volunteer some of your time to the ambulance service and find out for yourself how easy/difficult it is. It is truly a THANKLESS job. Unless you really understand the logistics of it and why things are done a certain way, please be a little more circumspect in your expectations. Run this little test, have a friend simulate a medical emergency at an unknown location 10 minutes away from you. Have him time how long it takes from the emergency to the phone call to be completed, until you arrive. It may have seemed like 30 minutes from the time of the emergency, but often if you ask to see the response log, you find that the call received time to the arrival time is significantly less than that.
I'm not trying to say that this was the case here, but often times the caller, due to the stressful situation, has a truly expanded perception of time. One time during army training, one of my section mates had a heat stroke, it seemed like hours before the ambulance arrived, in reality it was probably less than 20 minutes.
Another point to note, even if it only took as fast as 10 minutes to arrive, if the patient really had a heart attack and had cardiac arrest, if no CPR had been commenced and continued by the family, it is TOO LATE anyway. Within less than 7-8 minutes of an arrest, brain death is already occurring. Lesson here is, go for a basic life support course if you care about your loved ones, it might come in handy some day.
Condolences to your friend. Even with the best efforts in the world, the majority of out-of-hospital arrests don't do well.