I ll tell you. After of 2 years of android user and Samsung Moderator in Greeks biggest smartphone forum->
Like it or not software optimization comes only when hardware+software is one. Open source is the biggest myth in tech industry (which is still not as mature as car industry) a myth created mostly from the crapiest person in industry (bill gates) -> what that guy did (who is a great businessman not tech enthousiast but harvard abomination) is that he fooled customers with open source (in the way that any manufactor could pay license to use it not to change its core) and cheap pcs ( pc's for example from amiga with code written in assembly, from real developers like Woz not schoolboys from xda... took 5-7 years to develop and where expensive as hell.... cause in that era pcs were not affordable for anyone... and thats how should go and nowadays... while in the other hand current days we have all these moaners who complain about facetime over 3g, bt conectivity with other smartphones and that ios6 is loosing theme customization race with android etc useless silly things).... nevermind that guy persuaded sheep customers (he first forced us companies with monopoly games to use only windows os, commercials, money under the hood to editors etc and thats how he first expanded windows as an os) to buy those cheap pcs but then with the help of industry (amd,nvidia,ibm etc) he also pursuaded them to spend money in order to upgrade their pcs at least each 2 months... cause when the code is not written in assembly and when os and hardware are not one (like the old pc and nowadays macs) you have great bottleneck... pc parts dont communicate together in the same "heart beat" (different clock synch/speed for cpu, graphics card, memory etc)... also iphone,macs have bottleneck cause they are also not written in assembly but cause software and hardware are one that effect is reduced.
So i wrote all these because i love competition. Apple is also a company that sales lot of its products from marketing but it RESPECTS the consumer more because i prefer its SANDBOX philosophy. I would be the first supporter for Google when they had their chance to build their own sandbox company with motorola.... but they decided to continue following Microsofts crapppy philosophy with distributing os to many manufactors. I believe you read Balmers comments last weak about Surface tablet -> hardware and software as one is better blah blah blah....
For 2 years i was changing android smartphone after 2-3 months.... there are so many manufactors and you get addicted to upgrade all the time. With iphone you can stay with a phone at least 1-2 years. So i would never get so much money for an android flagship which it has crapppy as hell materials, racket size dimensions, angly design and not optimised software. The spec race is pointless when ICS isnt even optimised for dual cores.