And if you look at product roadmaps, very few other SoC manufacturers have quad cores in their roadmaps. Not TI. Not Qualcomm nor Samsung. Nvidia is pretty much the only one with the clear intent for the smartphone and tablet market. Last I checked Marvell had one planned, but not for mobile devices. (same is true for Qualcomm. They have quad core planned, but without radio in chipset, which means not intended for mobile devices)
Nvidia is out for the performance crown, just like with their GPUs. It's not clear there's even a market for mobile quad-cores yet. Thus, I don't expect Apple to go quad core soon, certainly not with Cortex A9 cores. They just went quad core in their high end laptops.
Not true. A5 launched before Orion (sorry, Orion was codename, SoC is called Exynos), which is used in the Galaxy SII and Galaxy Tab 10.1, both of which clearly launched after the iPad 2.
Actually, Apple utilizes IPS displays in their mobile displays, which offers superior viewing angles and color accuracy compared to normal TN panels. SLCD's main feature point is less light bleed, but it's still inferior to AMOLED in contrast, so it's not much for writing home about. The iPhone 4 still retains the highest ppi of any major phone display out there, so I wouldn't say they are behind any curve.