What Samsung here does is a simple 'survival of the fittest' game: They put all platforms in a race and let the market decide which one will win.
They don't. Their WP7 effort was very half hearted - at best a re-warmed Galaxy S - and their two latest successful flagships were both Android. Compared to the Galaxy Android phones, Bada and WP7 got relatively little publicity overall - especially WP7 - and nothing indicated Samsung put the same amount of backing to them in the "race." Their premium strategy now is Android and that's it. Bada has been promoted mostly as a low cost featurephone-like alternative with iOS-like touch screen.
For me, the difference between iOS and Android is that iOS very obviously was designed to limit your possibilities to a point that you feel like you only rented your equipment from Apple. Android, on the other hand, let's you OWN your equipment.
That's not unique to Android by any means. Windows Mobile and Symbian both allowed practically just as much freedom as Android to the end users, and Maemo, even more so. The main difference about Android is that Google allowed two iOS-like features - usable touch interface and a central app store - to be used by all hardware manufacturers. And strong promotional campaigns by carriers, which is crucial.
At the end, IMHO, contrary to the popular belief Android didn't succeed because it was "open." It succeeded because all the most capable hardware manufacturers brought their phones on the platform since it was the only usable platform with iOS-like features that were available for others. WebOS is an excellent example.
Look at the topic of this thread, WebOS. It was and still remains an extremely capable OS but Palm couldn't match the hardware expertise and sheer amount of phones released by Motorola, HTC, Samsung, etc, so it failed. Plus Sprint wasn't really that ideal choice of a partner compared to what Verizon did for Android phones.
And with iCoud and iOS 5, Apple is only bringing features to the iPhone customers that Google offered from the very beginning.
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and not only has Android caught up with iOS, it is now outperforming it in every aspect. (And just for the record, for a couple of months now, Android devices are also outselling iOS gadgets.)
"from the very beginning"? My Android phone, a Galaxy S, clearly doesn't do what iCloud says it will do even though it runs the latest Android ROMs. And I don't find it outperform iOS in "every aspect" at all. There are some nice areas I wish iOS does, definitely. But mostly I find Android, even at 2.3, feels a lot like an unpolished beta product in many ways, and would much prefer iOS. Alas, I'm with a non-iPhone carrier and so is my family so can't switch right now.
In any case, it's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would've happened if Palm actively sold WebOS to licensees much earlier. An HTC EVO-like phone with WebOS would've been a very intriguing proposition back then.