A poll? Who cares. Unless you are 12 years old. I use a phone fitting my needs.
"It was a huge article. For quite a while, iPhone 4 was ahead. I did a few page refreshes and EVO 4G was starting to catch up really fast. Next time I refreshed, the article disappeared without a trace....down the memory hole, like it never existed...many hundreds of comments in a couple of hours."
The other 10% are the ones reading a tech journal online and already have a fixed opinion on what they would get, so the playground analogy of "I want my favourite to win" is very well fitting to this situation.
Let's also not kid ourselves that there was some genuine gold or masterpiece of literature in the comments either (more likely some variant on the laughably naive "when will the world wake up and realise that they DON'T WANT A CLOSED PHONE OS"); the entire world would be better off if stuff like this wasn't even given the oxygen of publicity.
You're not even able to say that n% of Engadget readers felt some way, because the population of people who happen to show up while the survey is open is still not randomly selected within that demographic: what day of the week did you post it? Did someone with an axe to grind promote the blog post for you on another site, on facebook, or some IRC channel...on Colbert?
Respondents have to be randomly selected, and this is widely known. But since polls generate traffic and engage the readership everybody looks the other way. Even on esteemed sites like HN where everybody should know better - although I have faith that it's not done here for the purpose of generating traffic.
I'm an old fart, and "journalism" is an accolade that I would never bestow upon a techno-lust blog. Still, this event is dubious.
But it's not like the poll was actual quantitative measurement, so the world didn't lose anything of value beyond whatever dubious value it had to fanbois and rabid detractors alike.