The upside to Nexus is that it's pure Android. These days, the downside is that it's pure Android and essentially unsupported by the vendor. The incentive to

The upside to Nexus is that it's pure Android. These days, the downside is that it's pure Android and essentially unsupported by the vendor. The incentive to purchase Nexus or GPE devices was a lot greater pre-KitKat, but now that a lot of stuff has been abstracted away from the core and into Google Play Services & associated apps, being on the absolute latest core isn't often "necessary". The elephant in the room is that the vendor overlays (Touchwiz, Sense, etc) are so unique that switching device brands can be very disorienting, even to find straightforward settings and do simple things. I have quite a bit of experience with HTC's Sense, but my father just purchased an LG G3 (at my suggestion) and I had a heck of a time just navigating to and through the settings screens trying to find something easy (how to change the screen timeout). I am still happy with my GPE HTC One M8 and see 0 need to upgrade devices any time soon, but the next time I do it will probably be to either a Moto or Sony, both of which are minimally skinned, or something like a OnePlus running an alternative ROM.