Have a link for that? Unless there's something horribly wrong with Android, there's no reason why manually killing processes should ever reduce performance or battery life unless the act of killing a process were more resource intensive than the process would be otherwise.
Correct. It's when people install
automated task killers that kill mindlessly on an interval. If you kill every hour you might be ok, but when you start killing every 10 minutes or some absurd interval, you're probably wasting more CPU cycles closing/opening everything over and over again that its detrimental.
I've talked about this a billion times when Android first became mainstream. Yeah, it's fine when Google tells you you don't need task managers or to tweak the memory management of Android and that itll do it's own thing. Yet we've seen minfree tweaks differ phone to phone, and if anything we've learned 256mb, 384mb, 512mb, and 768mb aren't even enough to keep phones running smoothly. HTC applies a certain minfree tweak to its HTC One X series which has been reported as too aggressive. Bottom line is people loved to say that "Google says its fine" in the beginning, yet here we are two and a half years since the release of the Droid 1, and there's no golden recipe for memory management.
I think the point is that memory management was never perfect to begin with and there's many ways to setup your device, and your experience may vary depending on how you use your phone.
I still maintain there's nothing wrong with task killers as Google has basically admitted they are somewhat useful by allowing manual killing of tasks in ICS.
but we're seriously getting off topic and this is turning into an iOS vs Android thing.
On the note of the 1 button thing, while the iPhone has 1 home button, there are usually menu buttons built into the app. When people complained about Google moving from hard keys to 3 soft keys in the GNex, there was a good article saying the iPhone already uses virtual soft buttons in apps. Those buttons are there in every app. There's a setting menu, etc, etc. Even if you only have 1 hard key, the app will NEED some sort of menu button. You could cite Android too. ICS moved to a soft menu system. My Touchpad has 1 hard button. Oh no. Does this mean I can't use my tablet?
It's not so much about getting used to it as apps will be designed to have the appropriate soft keys that you NEED to navigate around.