It's true that Android initially didn't support touch; they were making a Blackberry competitor (http://www.talkandroid.com/109966-how-did-android-look-in-20...).

I'd argue that it wasn't because of doing a "good job" adding touch that allowed them to succeed. It was the price of free.

Even now all "touch" events are treated as 'click' events. And it's not easy to get access to the number of fingers on a view or to track them like iOS can.