Full disclosure: I owned an iPhone for 2.5 years. 3G, then 3GS. I got sick of calls dropping daily (that's on AT&T, though) so I jumped ship to Verizon and Android.
The only real problems I had with iOS was the locked-down nature of the operating system and the weak hardware. After jailbreaking and trying to make it more like Android in terms of usability and customization, it turned into a sluggish mess. After resetting the phone and installing the latest iOS that my little 3GS could handle, it was still a sluggish mess.
In terms of usability, it was fine. It always responded to my taps and swipes (Android often struggles with that, but I'm gonna blame it on a combination of HTC and Verizon fuckery), and I could usually find what I was looking for in the app store without too much searching.
Even then, Android was subjectively better. This was around the time Froyo was released, because I remember jumping ship to buy a Droid X. Froyo made iOS look bad. Really bad. Every iteration of Android since then has been getting progressively better, sleeker, smoother, and overall more enjoyable than iOS.
But that's all personal preference. I know people who love their iPhone not because it's an iPhone but because it works for them. It does what they want it to do with little to no hassle. For people who like to tinker, iOS is a shithole. For people who just want to pick something up and go, it's perfect. It's very much like the PC/Console "debate". Each side has fanboys that refuse to listen to logical and well-reasoned arguments from the other side, and each side has the people who know exactly what they're getting because they're getting exactly what they want.
This, however, doesn't look like anything that anyone would want. Quality control seems to be taking a big hit in the last few years. Crazy software bugs locking up or completely bricking devices, phones that can't hold their shape for more than a few days, and weird shit like this that just doesn't make any damn sense.
We need Apple, whether we'd like to admit it or not. We need Apple because that company is really good at getting people to believe that they need something. Google and Microsoft do a shit job at marketing their products, so when they come out with some amazing, game-changing feature the only people who know about it are the loyal nerds who dig through change logs and patch notes. A few tech nerd bloggers will write about it, but it will mostly just be a blip until 2 years later when Apple decides to add it into iOS, and then suddenly it's the best thing ever. Is it annoying seeing the Apple fanatics fawning over something that we've had for a long time? Yes. But at the same time, it means that there will be more of a demand for it outside of the "smelly basement-dweller" demographic. Look at "Apple Pay". It's just NFC credit cards built into your phone. I had that on my Galaxy Nexus 3 years ago. Every time I talked about it, people gave me that "Yeah, but why?" look and couldn't figure out why I was so excited about it. Then Apple puts it into a phone and people get shit-my-pants excited. Irritating as all hell, but if it increases the availability of NFC payments, I'm all for it.
So yeah. Apple is fucked and I can't even imagine wanting to go back to that. But we need them like Batman needs The Joker. And this response turned out to be a whole lot longer than I expected, especially for a post that all of 4 people are going to read.