[gnaffle]

I'm not so sure that the iOS creators predicted anything. They started off with OS X, which already had a smooth, responsive, GPU backed UI (Cocoa/Quartz Extreme). I don't think that they had to compromise on performance, but they did have to spend extra money on a GPU.

Likewise, a good low latency sound system with MIDI support was added to iOS not because Apple correctly predicted that smartphones and tablets would be popular for music production, but because those were features already present in OSX.

AFAIK, the Android designers started out making a Blackberry clone, and creating a similar software stack would have been a lot more work at a time when the competitors were all running 2D GUIs with no GPU acceleration or fancy animations.