Arguably, Apple has had great success by having a completely closed system which is why the argument that Android will succeed because it is open is such a fallacy in my opinion.
Android may be great, but its implementation is different on every Android phone. Different hardware, different features, different amounts of android functionality. You don't really have a consistent user experience any more than you do with Windows Mobile. Also, I bet that apps will not run the same across the hardware since so many different phones running Android have a wide variety of specs. I can see it turning into the nightmare that game/application developers have when making an application for the PC - you have a few hundred million permutations of possible hardware combinations in your potential user-base - good luck getting it to work properly and consistently on all of them!
Even to this day nearly every app made for the iPhone/iPod Touch will work very consistently across every version. Granted, the newer versions of the iPhone and iPod touch run and load the applications faster than their predecessors but the overall hardware that the developer has to deal with is very nicely uniform. This is also one of the core reasons why I think that the 360 and PS3 and Wii have such success compared to the PC for gaming. When you buy a game for those platforms you expect that you can take it home and it will just work.
I'm excited to see Android provide some real competition to Apple but realistically, even if Verizon does get the iPhone because Apple is facing strong competition from Google's mobile OS, do I really want to go back to Verizon? They have a great network sure, but they also had crappy customer service, dicked with their phones by disabling features and then trying to sell them back to me, doubled their smartphone cancellation fee and employ all kinds of scumbag tactics including selling unlimited data plans that aren't unlimited. Why is everyone so keen on being their customer again?