Second, software has to work in unison with hardware. Good software is useless without good hardware.
Really ? Sure the second statement is true, but the first ? You see, software being useless without hardware does not imply that software has to work in unison with hardware.
Software has been design as hardware agnostic for years. Linux, runs on things like TVs, networking equipment, watches, PCs, set top boxes for media viewing, etc.. etc.. It's a piece of software that's pretty much hardware agnostic. It does not work in unison with hardware, it exposes a driver architecture that permits hardware makers to write a compatibility layer for their devices.
Android uses Linux as a kernel, but goes 1 step farther. Android, the framework (not the OS), is written on top of the Java language and using a Java to bytecode compiler, is then run on a VM (Davlik) before being fed as native ARM code into the device through Linux' exposed syscall API to talk to the hardware, as presented by the driver layer (Linux translates the system calls to actual driver calls so that Davlik doesn't need to know what the underlying hardware is). But if one compiles Davlik for x86 instead of ARM, you can then run Android applications on top of x86 based devices (like Intel's new SoC for smartphones/tablets).
So the software doesn't know what architecture it's running on, it needs to know the Android framework. The Android framework needs to compile to bytecode to run on Davlik. Davlik knows of Linux system call interfaces. Linux knows about its driver architecture. The driver knows about the hardware.
All of that, so the software doesn't need to know any real fundamental details about the underlying hardware.
But of course, you'd need to actually know a thing or two about writing software and how modern OSes work to understand any of this. Feel free to go on thinking that "Android = Phone with a kaaaaybooooard then a touch screeeeeenn!!".
Don't let those stupid facts get in the way.
The fact is simple : Android and iOS are very different beasts. You want to claim the HTC Desire or the Samsung Galaxy SII is an iPhone clone ? Do so, that's another topic. You claimed with specifity that Android (the OS, software, the frameworks, name it) is a clone of iOS. Do you even understand the design philophies behind both OSes enough to make such a claim ? The UI design paradigms and where they come from ? Because frankly, I doesn't seem like it to me.
In fact, I'd claim ChrisTX is a blatant copy of all the other people that don't know squat about this subject in this case.
