I don't understand why you're so quick to defend Apple by changing the metric, despite nobody saying that this is any sort of "victory" for Samsung. It's an obvious result of the iPhone 5 release, it will be on top of the charts the next quarter as usual. If you're going to make it an iPhone vs. Android thing then you should compare the sales of all iPhones and all Android phones, you can't pick and choose a few from each category.
So when one phone reaches iPhone-level numbers, despite the fact that you could easily replace it with another similar specced Android phone, it makes it all the more impressive.
That being said, as an Android user, I don't really like this outcome. The fact that one Android manufacturer is getting close to Apple's sales numbers is pretty meaningless to me, and the fact that one Android manufacturer can sell 50% of Android phones is actually pretty worrisome. I'd rather have 5 top manufacturers with 15% or so market share each. Apple users may be fine with an "Apple monopoly" in the iOS market, but I'm not fine with a Samsung monopoly in the Android market.
But I guess it's all about the Pareto principle and other power laws like that, so it may be just a fact of life. At least it might be a lot easier to change who is the biggest Android company a few years down the road, if Samsung slips.
If you add iPhone 5 sales for that quarter to the iPhone 4s sales you get 24 million, 6 million more than for the S III. You have to look at this data with extremely narrowly focused, Android tinted lenses to make this look like any kind of victory for Samsung.
It does show that at last a flagship Android phone is managing to sell in iPhone-like numbers. That's a good thing for Android and for the health of competition in the smartphone market. Samsung are doing well.