I think a significant part of this problem is that it's hard to know when choosing an Android device exactly what tradeoffs you're making. How many reviews include information about the quality and calibration of the gyroscope, motion sensor and magnetometer systems? Other than perhaps some test shots, how much do you really know about the camera quality? Are all the relevant APIs implemented, and how good a job are the drivers doing?

It's great the Android offers so much choice in terms of features and price, but the upshot is that you're not buying a device with an android sized slice of market share from the point of view of app support, for many purposes you're buying a device with a that-device sized slice of market share.

In the old PC days the exact spec of a machine didn't usually matter much. However for mobile devices, the plethora of advanced sensors they come with and the complexity of software capabilities that take advantage of them has made fragmentation a much bigger issue, but really only if you're interested in the most advanced features.

For most phone users it doesn't make that much difference, but if you're interested in cutting edge features the quality of hardware and software integration and application support has become critical. Samsung almost has enough critical mass to establish a stable platform for advanced Android applications, but the problem is it just doesn't have the vision and discipline to do so by actually establishing a stable baseline for the features and software in it's phones.