1. Android makers don't necessarily pay Microsoft for patents on things that were invented in Windows Phone. They pay licenses for patents that relate to either a) computers in general, or b) that you could do on mobile devices in general. Examples include the infamous FAT patent, patents on low-level concurrency primitives, and patents on synchronizing calendar clients. "Good" patents? I don't know. But it's disingenuous to compare Android to Windows Phone because a) it implies Android is licensing stuff that came later, and b) from a product that is inferior, insinuating these patents are low quality. If I were uncharitable, I'd say Google ordered a hit piece after all the love Microsoft has been getting the past couple of days!
2. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, these companies cannot find enough "good" engineers to hire, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. Is their bar too high? Maybe. Or they may justly be concerned about allowing a "bozo explosion". And even if they did hire more engineers, they still have billions of dollars left over. Patents are designed to be a risk to those that would not reward inventions they practice, and reducing risk to the company is a fine way of spending that money,
3. Using these patents to crush future competition? These companies can more easily crush competition by buying them up rather than suing them. A 2009 study found only a small fraction of lawsuits involve large companies suing smaller ones: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396319 - and I would bet none of the large tech companies would risk the PR fallout.
4. There is no "patent litigation crisis", just increased media coverage of litigation that is more or less in line with historical rates. Less than 2% of active patents are ever asserted and only a fraction of a percent ever make it to trial. See studies by Mark Lemley, for instance. The "smartphone wars" were just a drop in the bucket of all other patent litigation that happens. In fact there were higher rates of litigation in history when major technical developments happened: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=