Somewhat broad generalization ahead...
About once a year, Apple comes out with ONE new phone, an iPhone. If the phone is bad, Apple goes out of business. Apple bets the company every year on that new iPhone, and to make that a reasonable bet, they spend tons and tons of marketing on design, engineering, quality, and customer support. Apples knows a bad iPhone makes WSJ / New York Times front pages. Apple knows that to make a bad iPhone loses them iPad, iPod, Macbook,... customers.
And so ... by and large, Apple does not make bad iPhones.
In contrast
Four times a year, each, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Kyocera, Huawei, Sony, and others, come out with a new Android phone. This phone is one of many many products made by each of these companies. The success or failure of any of these phones means almost nothing to the company. And so, the product development and rollout of any of these phones is not a bet-the-company gamble. Accordingly, very little effort is made on design, engineering, and customer support. None of these companies have terribly loyal customers, most seem to buy a given phone based on carrier affiliation, or based on costs. Losing a customer here is bad, but does not carry the long term cost as losing a customer at Apple does.
And so there is very little incentive to make anything but competitive (in all the wrong meanings) phones here. There is a race to the bottom mentality going on.
"We think the phone we make is good, at least as good as the phone they make. Let's get some more marketing dollars from our partners for it and we will all be happy"
I then went to look at Creative's website, and looked through their list of products. They had 16 separate models, many of which were very subtle variations (e.g. the 316 vs. the 316z). There was no breakdown page that would show you the differences or help you decide. Some of them had LCD screens, some of them played WMA, some of them had more space, some came in multiple colours, but you didn't know which had what or what it cost until you clicked on the page. Making a completely informed decision would take hours of clicking links, making notes, hitting the back button, and then clicking the next link.
I marvelled that not only was Creative competing against Apple, they were competing against themselves. They produced 16 different models, which requires 16 different manufacturing processes, 16 different packagings, 16 different manuals (each in a variety of languages), 16 different QA processes.
The same thing is happening here. Manufacturers are largely unwilling to challenge Apple in the high-end of the market (where the Galaxy S, Nexus S, iPhone 4, etc. all live), so they work in the smaller end. The lower prices mean lower margins and lesser quality parts. This also leads to less testing and QA, meaning a lower quality finished product.
As a result of these lower margins, they need to sell more phones, which means producing more models of phones and shortening the lifetimes of the phones in order to encourage people to turn them over faster. It's becoming a race to the bottom.
People compare Android and iOS to Windows and Mac, but it feels like the better comparison is Mac vs. PC hardware, not software. Apple makes very few models of computer (Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro), which they refresh lately. There are lots of variations, but you have four base models which are simple to understand. In comparison, if you go to Dell's website, there are a dozen models you can buy, each with subtle variations, and even with different prices depending on which business unit you buy from. Other PC manufacturers all do the same thing, and because they don't control the software they ship (other than crapware), they can only really differentiate on price.
It's become a race to the bottom, trying to slash costs and increase volumes at the same time, and PC manufacturers have realized that they're fighting over a huge chunk of the market and leaving Apple to actually make the profits. Android certainly has the potential to surpass Apple in market share, but they're going to be fighting over a much smaller chunk of profits, fragmenting their efforts over multiple products and competing against other manufacturers' multiple products.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Google needs to create a new platform that curates as well as Apple does. Or sit and watch while Amazon builds one on top of Android.
In the long run, Google needs to do something about this, or face it doing severe damage to the image of their platform.
I bought the MyTouch3G (2nd Android phone ever), the G2, the Nexus S and recently the Galaxy Tab. Overall, I'm very happy with the experience of each of these phones. There are other phones out there that have great experiences as well. As a consumer, I will research these purchases which matter and will pay with my time to get exactly what I want. If you want to, instead, pay for one company to handle quality end-to-end for you, then you will pay for that, too.
For me, the pluses in Android outweigh the (few) minuses (that remain).
For anyone else, it's great that they have the choice to make. :)
If years of market research prowess fails me and I consistently see similar stories crop up every month or two where other technically inclined people regret purchasing some other Android device, it says to me that I didn't simply get a lemon or make a huge mistake in my decision making but the market itself has a problem, whatever issues and loopholes allowed it before have remained unfixed. Since the price difference between iPhones and top end Android phones are basically the same ($100 variance or so on a >$2k total cost...big deal), and that I can mindlessly buy whatever the next iPhone release will be and have pretty good assurance Apple has my back, I'm completely unwilling to waste time researching Android devices and still possibly get bit in the ass for my efforts.
The "with Google" branding meaning nothing in terms of actual phone experience, and Samsung isn't the only vendor at fault here. After my experience, and dozens of similar accounts like this blog post, I don't recommend anyone buy an Android phone that isn't a "by Google", like the Nexus line, and even then, only if they have some strong objection to getting the iPhone, which I would recommend over any current Android device.
I really, really, really wanted to like Android, but you can damn-near put an 18 month countdown on the majority of the Android phones before the manufacturer abandons it and you're stuck using XDA developers or the like for updates, patches and improvements, or just to fix the stock crap they ship. On a 24 month contract cycle, that's just unacceptable.