"But my interest remains ... in the quality of the apps, not the quantity. Let’s say ... Android winds up with far fewer total apps than iPhone OS, but they’re of generally higher quality. That would make Android the Mac to the iPhone’s Windows. I would switch to that platform."

This is a poorly thought out sentiment -- or maybe just poorly expressed. He's saying if the quality of Android apps is "generally higher" he'll switch.

Who cares about the average quality? Any healthy app store is going to have a couple dozen iFart variants -- who gives a shit. As long as I can find the good stuff (which, by and large, you can with Apple's app store) and as long as there IS good stuff then I'm happy.

To this point I can see the application ecosystem going the way of consoles and relying on marquee titles to succeed. Halo had a huge role in legitimizing Xbox as a gaming platform and you'd hope MS might learn from this with handsets.

Actually, it's amazing Microsoft doesn't seem to apply the lessons it has learned from its gaming console success more often. Maybe that's just big company politics though.