I have an Android phone, and though I like the Sprint service better than AT&T's, compared to an iPhone using the phone itself is an exercise in clunkiness and awkwardness.
I just flashed it to 2.1 (itself an exercise in unnecessary foldirol) and it feels somewhat smoother, but not Apple-smooth.
90% usability may be a good deal, but only for the 20% of people who put the effort in to find benefit from the technology. Everyone else would have spent less, but gained less as well -- as they ignore large swaths of features, spending only enough cognitive time to use one or two core applications.
E.g. Note the incredible flexibility and power of desktop PCs and how that's been almost completely ignored by 90% of users, who barely know enough to do email and the web.
And that's a particular issue in the case of a mobile, secondary-computing device such as tablets, where having the functionality isn't anywhere near as important as actually improving the experience of using those functions.
i.e. They have passable email on their desktop and/or phone, so you need more than passable email to sell a tablet. If 'almost' having good usability was good enough, we'd have been hip-deep in windows tablets for the last decade and Palm PDAs before that.
Apple is happy owning a small market share while obtain a higher price for its items.
What do you mean "wants to be", isn't it that already? Heck, for every phone maker that isn't Apple or doing production for Apple, iPhone OS isn't even an option anyway. So really, it wants to be the low-cost alternative to the future Microsoft option and in-house OS's that phone manufacturers have. If you mean from the phone user's perspective, then Android phones and iPhones seem to be at price parity (and this competition has been fantastic no matter which phone you end up picking, btw), but feel free to run some numbers if you want (last I did it was a wash depending more on how you wrote the rules of the comparison than anything else).
How long have you had the Android phone? Switching OS's can grate on one's trained expectations even when the two are equivalent in usability. It can take a while before you can really compare them honestly (or for cognitive dissonance to do its work, as the case may be).