Jacob Wilson has a long post describing his horrific experience with HTC ThunderBolt which he bought after he gave up his iPhone 4 because of AT&T's service (or lack of) in his area.
I couldn't help but agree with many of his points.
Yes, Android is much less polished than iOS;
Yes, iOS is a part of a beautifully integrated hardware / software / services experience while at the same time carriers and manufacturers are doing highly incompetent things with Android, rushing to release in the wild untested devices, applications and UI skins;
That being said, Android is quickly moving forward. I doubt it will ever be as polished and well-designed (for the end-user) as iOS but the bar is definitely raising. It is already at a point of being good enough for the majority of people (just look at the stats), and the things will only improve with time (if nothing goes terribly wrong in Google's garden).
The analogy is not complete, but we've seen this before. If you have a product that is far from perfect but still just good enough and ubiquitous, you are likely to dominate the market. Not 100% of the market, but still dominate it.
