Your point and the responses so far bring up what I consider to be Android's biggest problem - unpredictability. Since background software can run haphazardly,

Your point and the responses so far bring up what I consider to be Android's biggest problem - unpredictability. Since background software can run haphazardly, a single piece of misbehaving software can bring even the most powerful Android phone to a standstill. And that's no good, if a user finds that something is slow, they simply stop using it. Google encounters this everyday with its search results. For some reason, the Android team hasn't seem to have figured this out.