It's really useful to look at the context of the market at the time. High-end phones ran a mobile variant of Windows, or were Blackberries. Screen sizes
were getting larger and having data coming to your phone at all was still considered a bit exotic but was starting to happen. Touch, if there was any, was usually on a non-capacitive screen and was generally pretty terrible. The integration of sensors, data, GPS, etc. was starting to happen, but wasn't ubiquitous.
The market was also incredibly fragmented both on the hardware and software side. The hard divide between feature phones and smart phones hadn't yet been delineated in a general sense (the Windows phones were just kind of clunky and weird, and Blackberry basically had it's own market segment and represented "smart phones" in the press). Phones just kept getting higher and higher end, and adding more and more features.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/
The most anticipated phone for 2007 was Nokia's N95, the press called it a "multimedia device". It came with GPS, quad-band, 5MP camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, an accelerometer, a Web Browser, a big screen, apps. It looks vaguely like an older iPod, but has a pop out numeric keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
At the time it was considered one of the best phones ever released and sold 10 million. At the time it was sometimes called smartphone, but I think today we'd call it an advanced feature phone.
Android thus came out in this market, and the phones it originally targeted looked more like the N95 than the iPhone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they rethought the form-factor and simplified it, getting rid of most buttons and making touch not suck. But functionality-wise the iPhone was about on par with the N95, and so was Android. However, the first iPhone didn't support user apps, had limited connectivity and sold only 6.1 million devices.
When Android started supporting phones with iPhone-like form factors, it wasn't a given that it would become the predominant form factor for phones. The first few generations of Android phones still features lots of vestigial keyboards and buttons and rollers and sliders and such carried over from the N95 and blackberry style phones that Android devices were also looking like. Once the iPhone style form factor started leaving everybody else in the dust, Android phones (and the OS) simply dropped that stuff also.