Don't forget that Android also takes a lot of the burden away from phone manufacturers in that they no longer need to invest as much time developing their own phone software. Android is ready to go. Customization isn't nearly as tedious as writing your own stuff from scratch.

But more importantly, phone companies don't have to wait for Google to release a newer version of Android. They can simply mod the one that's currently available and do as they wish with it. With the iPhone, AT&T is stuck watching Apple's clock, giving them no wiggle room at all.

Look at the market for PCs... every one is different. All Macs... pretty much the same. There are supposedly three-and-a-half generation of iPhone, but it takes an expert to tell them apart. And mostly, they just added features that every other smart phone had from the get-go... 3G networking, video, etc.

This was a brilliant strategy to win the market, too. Every existing cellular carrier in the USA, anyway, has wanted to mess with their phones a bit... brand identity, whatever. Often, this has resulted in really castrated functionality... like Verizon's version of the Motorola RAZR. So now, vendors can do all the customizations they like, but it doesn't necessarily affect the functionality at all, because Android is designed to support this. And they've even branded a guarantee of "we didn't break any functionality", under the "Google Experience" banner.

The future is clear.. Apple released a couple new iPhones this year, with slightly incremental features. There are something like 50 different Android phones expected to hit the market before the next iPhone upgrade. That's momentum!