Developers can do all this and much more to customize the alerts their apps display on Android:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notification.html
One of the notifications in our Android app shows a progress bar during uploads/downloads along with the packets sent and received. Tapping it allows the network operation to be canceled. The power LED on the device flashes different colors to indicate if errors ever occur. You can't do anything like that on iOS.
Of course, you're talking about users and I'm talking about developers. I don't think users can customize notifications much... and given how diverse notifications can be on Android, I don't think it'd be possible for Android to have a unified set of notification options like iOS.