[iamtommcc]

To answer your questions:

1. Yeah, still not great. 2. No, homescreen widgets now exist in iOS 3. Short answer is "kind of". There's official support for setting default web & email clients, but many (most?) apps support setting a preference for e.g. mapping providers.

All that being said, I think you're coming at things mostly from a feature angle which is perhaps a different discussion.

From a pure aesthetic consistency, polish, and end-to-end visual experience perspective Apple still does a better job than Google.

Whether or not that extra dash of visual polish makes up for feature deficiencies or ecosystem limitations is a broader question of course.