My wife has a Nexus 7, and it's great. I have an HTC phone, it's also great.
This whole article seems like a bad attempt at discrediting Google and Android....
The same thing occurs in general software development. The developers will often have more and larger screens, faster computers, more memory, storage, faster networking etc than their average customer. And that can lead to a worse than expected experience for their customers.
The poster could explore what Google can do about it. One obvious thing is to make stock Android that much "better" so that consumers seek it out, or at least prod vendors to keep up. The other is to make Android upgradable to the current/best version - a choice Google did not make except for very limited areas (play store and services).
I don't know how this would scale very well. Impressive Verizon!
Fix that conundrum, and you will have a lot of your problems fixed with the ecosystem. Perhaps bifurcating the "os" from "runtime" or something is necessary so google can update everyone to the same 'version' of 'android'
I don't know where to draw the line, but this is a chief reason iOS eats android for lunch app dev wise.