Those are all minor UI nitpicks. Android is open-source. If an "Update All" or better placement of Forward/Back buttons in Gmail app is so important to you, you should add it.
Also, lack of copy and paste is not a "minor" nitpick. As I recall it's one of the things that iPhone haters would not stop harping about when Android first came out with the half-baked copy and paste it still has today. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofQqhJ_fa2M) Even if that wasn't the case, it's a major, serious deficiency in the device whose absence I would miss on a fairly regular basis if I didn't have it with my iPhone.
* Copy-paste anything from the browser to elsewhere. You see how you have to go two-deep into a menu? For iPhone users, they just tap the text they want to copy, the drag to put the bounds at the right place.
* Try copying anything out of a received gmail message and pasting it somewhere else.
> that will probably leave the iPhone in the dust within about 6-12 months
If I had a dollar for every time an open source advocate claimed incorrectly that their preferred solution would leave its proprietary competitor in the dust in "just a few months," I'd have a lot of money. Not so much in the opposite direction.
Of my consumer electronics devices, about half are based on open source (appletv, nexusone, roku, linksys access point)... I don't know about my toaster, microwave, etc.
My blackberry is not, and I doubt things like tvs and dvd players are, but every day there are more benefits to companies using open source. The main threat to this is the GPLv3 license, but fortunately that's not getting too much traction.