As for your assessment, the two features upon which your sarcasm was centered were obviously among the most trivial mentioned. Therefore, there was little invitation to respond to your argument based upon its merits.
Sometimes of course, one just makes a snarky comment and lets the karma fall where it may. Maybe if you had a few hundred karma points, it would be an option.
As for the flagging, on most of the internet it has long been socially acceptable to praise Apple and disparage Microsoft in public forums - Apple of course encouraged this sort of thing with their long running "I am a Mac/PC" advertising campaign.
This social norm is actually one of the issues which got me interested in Apple and their advertising and the way in which people who like their products feel free to act in public - seriously, every time the Macbooks get a new case or port or processor upgrade, there's been a front page story here on HN.
Google of course doesn't have that luxury of a huge consumer following - people use them by default e.g. as their standard search engine or as the free touchscreen smartphone. And they are smart enough to know what that may mean over the long term - particularly when handset manufacturers now have agreements in place with Microsoft in all probability due to their rush to ship Android.
Is there a concerted effort to flag Microsoft stories? The killing of stories from WinSuperSite is consistent with it. The killing of the "Gmail Man" story is consistent with it as well - particularly given the quality of the discussion which was taking place.
I think you got it. I imagine many people flag topics when the discussions in them reach a certain low.
As for the features I mentioned, they are, certainly, the most trivial. But it's also surprising (baffling, actually) Microsoft allowed WP7 to reach the market without them and I'd be ashamed to list such basic features as improvements. It's like saying "now makes calls". And a more constructive approach would be to point out those are the least relevant features and that the others are much more interesting (and why).
When I got the Nokia, I went out and bought an 8GB card for it. It peaked at about 1GB of usage - I could have stored all that on the phone's memory instead.
My WP7 phone has about 10GB free (more than half). It's not an issue. My wife has an 8GB iPhone, memory is not an issue (are you baffled that iPhones don't have removable storage?)
Data plan usage has never been an issue for the people I am around - even though I imagine it is for some people. And if I cared, the data usage available from my carrier via my phone.
The way I see it, those are listed just so that there is something that everyone can get their head around when comparing specs.
I was trying to make a meta-point. There are root posts complaining every article criticizing Google and Apple is flagged into oblivion while the same happens to comments that are Microsoft-unfriendly.
In this case, it could be the sarcasm too. Anyway, it could be more productive to point me why my sarcastic assessment is wrong.