[chubot]

Uh, isn't the obvious comparison iOS?

I think the difference is that Apple had decades of institutional GUI expertise. Android engineers were more like hardware/OS guys as far as I can tell, and perhaps less experienced with the abstractions conducive to easily creating nice GUIs.

[rqebmm]

iOS and the Cocoa framework also have their fair share of hard to work with APIs. Like the OP said, you're always going to have to make compromises between conflicting requirements.