Lol
This is seriously uninformed.
First of all, vertical integration is not everything.
But furthermore, it takes significantly less time to adapt an OS which you have full control on (Android) than to write & maintain one, especially these times where mobile technology moves forward at such a fast pace. Not that this is not taking a black box and installing it onto your device. Android is open source and you can adapt it to your hardware all you want. Also, it just so happens that it runs just fine on existing mobile platforms, because it was designed that way. But you can still adapt it and make it "more efficient".
Also, that stuff they wrote about the RAM is just laughable. It has NOTHING to do with vertical integration. As the article describes, it has more to do with how the OS manages multitasking. Apple chose not to offer multitasking to devs, and thats why it requires less RAM. This allows for less cost.
Anyone could write an OS based on Android that is not Android that does this exactly the same way as iOS, and this would be MUCH MUCH easier to do than writing and maintaining their own OS.
One could argue that Android is usually more laggy than iOS, which is mostly true. But again, this has NOTHING to do with the "Apple controls hardware to software" thing. It is just a design choice for how you handle running code on different computer architectures. This problem is not only there on Android, every platform will be run on different architectures, and stuff will need to be recompiled or virtualized.
I'll tell you the REAL reason why comparing RAM between iOS and, for example, Android devices needs to be taken with a grain of salt:
Other that the fact that each handle multitasking differently (mostly, iOS doesn't offer an API for the devs to launch background processes), one does virtualization, which requires a lot more memory (and BTW, that is the cause that Android is usually sluggish, it uses a Garbage Collector which interrupts the UI thread and causes lots of frame drops). Plus, Android allows background services and stuff like that to be launched and drain your battery. But even then, you can see how Android devices have more RAM and usually need to "reload" far less. If you measure available RAM on either system, you will see how iOS usually has far less available memory than an Android device.
Depending on which Android device you use, you will se how some take ages to multitask compared to an iPhone, others will just instantly switch tasks (a Nexus comes to my mind), mostly even faster than on iOS, because all apps are still in memory - having 256MB free RAM leaves a lot for browser tabs and open apps.
Also, note how Apple is the largest phone manufacturer, they only produce one phone and put significantly more resources into it than anyone else. THAT is different to how others do it. Look at motorola or samsung, they do lots of different phones. If they just did one high-end phone, maybe they could handle every little detail and efficiency like Apple does with the iPhone. HTC can't usually use super expensive parts like the iPhone's touchscreen because they are not going to produce that many parts since they have lots of phones in the market.
To each his own strategy, but please leave this whole "apple designs HW and software, and therefore its better" argument alone, I think that is mostly exaggerated. My macbook pro is running on hw that is not that different from others' hw, its the software which has been very carefully designed which makes the difference. Others could do it just as well, but they don't. They do it their way, which works out quite well for many people, I should add.
