Yes, I find that to be the case also. While it's true that Apple builds good products, the fans generally try to make them look more innovative and to put the competition in a bad light. This can be explained by cognitive dissonance.
LTE is a perfect example. I don't give a damn whether my next phone has LTE. I have better things to do with my time than figure out whether the coverage — independent of carriers' marketing claims — is decent, make guesses — independent of etc. etc. — as to the extent of the coverage rollout over the next year, read up on the battery-life implications of LTE, and ponder whether the bottleneck on my phone has anything to do with the network speed in the first place.
(Actually, I already have a very strong suspicion about where the bottleneck is on my phone, and that's why I really don't care about LTE right now.)
Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology. So far I've been very happy with that approach. So, yes, if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature in a phone, I figure that there's probably a good reason for it, a reason that I'd understand and possibly even agree with if I invested a lot of time in the question.
The risk is that, should Apple go rogue, they could rip me off for an iteration or two before I wised up. In which case I would just go buy another phone from someone else and be done with it.
It's not like I'm blindly trusting Apple to not, say, saw off my leg and feed it to alligators; I'm trusting them to make decisions about a whole bunch of tradeoffs, decisions that will at best be valid only for a few months anyway, decisions on which hinge the expenditure of a few hundred dollars.
I'm not saying that becoming a micro-expert on your purchases is wrong, just that there's something to be said for not bothering. This is very much not the Nerd Way, but I have to say that I'm much happier since I stopped having to personally establish the perfect correctness of all my techno-purchasing decisions.
As for me, I fall on the other side of that point. Whenever I use an Apple product, I find that I'm often annoyed at the decisions that have been made for me, but more than that, I'm not allowed to change that decision.
It's interesting, though, that people on either side of line regard the other side's feature as a bug.
The big win in an inflexible system like the iPhone — aside from it being inherently more discoverable and predictable — is that it's much easier and more reliable to get an intelligent, thinking, learning human to adapt to an inflexible system than it is to build a system that can deftly adapt to various imagined human desires.
It's this inflexibility, oddly enough, that gives Apple its reputation for ease of use: it's possible to make much more concrete statements about the operation of a Mac or an iPhone or iPad than it is about most competing systems and devices. The system perceived as 'friendly' is, oddly enough, the one that imposes its will upon the user.
LTE has nothing to do with my message, you're responding to jrockway now.
I was talking about how Apple fans slightly alter history to make Apple look better. Lesser known inventors/persons/products are brushed aside and Apple gets all the credit. Tesla vs. Edison.
How many Apple fans know about LG Prada and how many of them think that Apple invented the touch-screen phone? Apple is very good at POLISHING existing concepts. This is a very important skill in itself, but why not call it for what it is instead of lavishing such praise on them?
Here's another one: most Mac users still have the impression that Macs are inherently more secure than Windows machines when the opposite is in fact true. This has been mentioned by several security people here on HN to the surprise of others.
And here's you doing it: "Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology." A good phone first of all has to be able to make and take calls, but iPhone 4 has a critical hardware flaw that makes it drop calls. There are no technology constraints that prevent Apple from making a phone that doesn't drop calls when touched.
An yet, in spite all of this, do you think that iPhone 4 is a mediocre phone? No, you still think it's the best "all-around" phone.