I strongly disagree with this sentiment. The "little things" is what has put Apple so far ahead of the competition in so many places. While other companies are content to reach the 90% product, Apple has consistently achieved the 99%, and consumers have answered with their wallets.

The key to beating Apple, or even just matching Apple, is to deliver the same attention to detail, and things like touch lag is a major component of this.

Think about the MacBook sleep indicator. It has a soft "breathing" rhythm modeled on the frequency of human breathing. How many users do you think are actively looking at the sleep indicator on their laptop? Yet it has become an iconic and beloved feature of the product. Many competitors have tried to clone the "sleeping light", yet none of them could even be arsed enough to get the feel right.

Same goes for the "shines through metal" indicator lights on MacBooks webcams/battery indicators. Would a user consciously notice if they got rid of it? Probably not, but its presence lends a fit and finish that communicates quality.

> "which tries to make it look like this minor difference is important to the user"

That's just it though. It is important to the user, though you'd never know it if your only metric for measuring user happiness are conscious observations. Very few users can articulate "the time lag between input and action is too great" in those words - but I'm willing to bet 90% can feel it, and will fail to articulate it to a focus group or similar. The difference is magnified if the user is comparing the two products side by side.

I've heard it expressed in many ways. It's "laggy" (which is the most accurate term for it), it's "not snappy", it's "slow" (which is inaccurate, but the layman generally doesn't know the distinction between speed and lag). Sometimes a user will feel it and can't articulate it at all!

I'm willing to bet, if you could find someone who has never used either iOS or Android, and hand them one of each device, loaded with just a simple scroll list. Let them interact with it, and ask them something as simple as "which one felt better to use". Who do you think will win? One product has just won the entire contest by visceral reaction alone, before the conscious brain has even kicked in. Details matter.

> "There are so many other major differences between Android and iOS that are much more relevant to the user, like lock-in, choice of different handsets etc."

This is the RIM angle, and I'd have thought that by 2012 we'd have put this one to rest already. Competing on functionality and features doesn't win anything. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", anyone? The iPod, the iPhone, and hell, the MacBook all came out into a market where there already exist functionally superior products. Remember the guffaws when Steve marched on stage with an EDGE phone when the industry was already rolling out 3G? That sure put the kibosh on the iPhone launch, eh?

This is the problem with most technical types - we think the decision matrix is 80% function 20% experience, but in reality it's the opposite. Apple has taken this realization and made hundreds of billions betting on it.

The whole point I'm making is much better communicated in a great book: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. He's not a software or even electronics guy, but rather industrial design.

In the book, he posits a thesis: that a product is perceived at three levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. We're talking about the visceral reaction here - the immediate, subconscious reaction a user gets when they interact with Android vs. iOS. The texture of the screen, the responsiveness of the UI, the reaction of elements to touch. Without locking down the visceral reaction, your product will never feel "right".