The hardware/software split is too simplistic a view. The companies have their various strengths and weaknesses. For example, the graphics stack on iOS embarras

The hardware/software split is too simplistic a view. The companies have their various strengths and weaknesses. For example, the graphics stack on iOS embarrasses Android's. It took how many years and how many hardware advances before flagship Android got scrolling as smooth as the first iPhone? Another example: Google released Renderscript in early 2011 (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-renderscript.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-r...) only to deprecate it a little over a year later (https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.1.html#Renderscript https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.1.htm...). We can cherry pick examples all day long, but the bottom line is that each company excels at certain things. It's interesting how Samsung is basically stuck to Google at this point. I'm sure they'd love to switch to their own Bada or Android fork and capture more of the profit, but Samsung is absolutely abysmal at software.