I guess this is the difference. Android users are using computers. iPhone users are manipulating things under glass.

That makes absolutely no sense.

the latency on android gives the phones the feeling of using a computer. the lack of latency on ios gives phones the feeling of actually manipulating things on the screen.

iOS latency is still well above what's noticable by human perception. Tack on to that all of the delays you get once you're running a newer version of iOS on older devices (which I suspect is the majority of people using Apple products) and I think it's pretty obvious that there's less of a gap in how people perceive the interaction model than you're suggesting.