You know, as much fun as modding is, and overclocking sure as hell is, at the end of the day its all about usability.
I spend a solid 3-4 weeks testing my initial system, overclocking, finding the limits, filling pages in my lab notebook with RAM timings, clock speed settings, temperatures, voltages, etc. I fill up XtremeSystem forum posts with screenshots, benches, etc.
At the end of this all I know my system is optimized to the max. I've hit the ceiling, and I've also found a setpoint for my awesomesauce i7 to run 24/7. Great. I run great for 3 months. Check BIOS and save it. I never think about these settings again and all I care about now is if I can game, do my photo editing, write the papers I need to write, download what I download, my daily crap. It's not about modding anymore.
Yeah sure I modded the hell out of my computer, but after that initial state does it MATTER? I no longer know which driver version gives me the best 3D Mark score, or what each version did. I no longer know why I need to update my BIOS because when I was tweaking a certain revision worked better with my RAM chips. All these things blow over you now and you no longer care if you no longer stay up to date.
6 months later I notice one day that when I go into BIOS it tells me that the clockspeed was reset to 2.8ghz due to instability. I'm not sure when it reset me, but obviously sometime after 3 months into my system usage, my system probably crashed due to instability (whoops I failed at stability testing), and I was reverted back to stock timings and stock clocks.
I didn't even notice 4ghz vs 2.8ghz obviously. It ran great for 3 months, but sometime later it changed and I didn't even catch it. WHY? Because booting up in 15 seconds vs 18 seconds doesn't really matter. Boosting my SuperPI time doesn't matter. What mattered more to me was being able to do the things that I do daily.
Yeah, it's great installing custom ROMs and kernels give you a 40% boost in Quadrant. But when the novelty of flashing a new ROM every 3 days wears off, then what? After you settle with a ROM, are you going to care about these small details like overclocking that extra 1mhz out of your phone? At a certain point all you care about is your day to day operations.
That's what the iPhone is focused on. Sure it's not a mod friendly phone, but you can do shit. That's what matters. The apps written for it are made so it can do MORE. It's a media consumption and production device, and it does its job 10x better with 3rd party apps. On the other hand, Android just absolutely fails at media consumption/production.
You have a great modding device, but web traffic shows that iOS crushes Android. So you have a smartphone that you don't surf on? Same with Flickr and Facebook and tweets. So much of it is done by iPhone users. So what do Android users do? Just mod their phone all day long? Since when was the main point of a smartphone to just mod?
Don't get me wrong I love flashing ROMs on my Android phone, but at the end of the day, when I'm out and about I'm curious about surfing to look info up Wikipedia, or to share a photo on Facebook, or to add a place to Foursquare, or to send some info I looked up via SMS, it just seems easier via iOS. They got the basics down. And while you're spending your time finding that CM rom that lets you display your call log in exact time instead of "6 days ago" in Stock Android, I could be using my phone as a smartphone. Not just trying to set it up.