"piece of crap that nobody would ever want to buy anyway"
I'm totally with you. It's like shirts without pocket protectors. Pocket protectors are a brilliant, sensible idea that adds utility to an otherwise poorly designed garment. What kind of sheeple would buy ones without them?
Another perspective would be that some people like getting laid. Pocket protectors are sold to nerds for whom every last bit of utility is vastly more important than appearance or likelihood of meeting a woman outside of an MMO and regular shirts are sold to the rest of the populace who are really quite happy without them as they're not carrying pens around in their shirt pockets anyway.
I propose an empirical test:
1) Get a new iPhone when it comes out. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new iPhone? What do you think of its design? Can I hold it? Wow, it really does feel thinner/lighter/whatever."
2) Get a new Android phone. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new Evo X2? Does it have the 1.2 or the 1.2.1 antenna? Have they released a firmware hack yet? Screenshotting is so elegant once I hacked mine, installed a custom app, uninstalled that one and installed one that works on my model."
Did group 1 or group 2 get more respondents? Would you actually want to sleep with any of group 2? OK, scratch that, this is Slashdot and we're all happy to date to our level. But imagine you're part of the rest of the population.
I'm being facetious, of course - though, for much of the population, what'll get them laid really is a big consideration. That's why we live in a world with expensive clothes and expensive cars.
In my own case, the criteria was simple: My wife already hates me for giving her four different interfaces she has to learn to use just to watch the damn TV, all because I thought Netflix and Hulu plus YouTube would be a good cable replacement then wanted to try a 360 in one room and a PS3 in another. Giving her a phone that just works, that she can call me and say, "How do I do X"? and it'll be a couple of clicks away, not a, "Well, you need to root it first, then go to this obscure site, download this package, now if you install it correctly, you'll get to do the feature in a way that's totally inconsistent to how everything else you're used to on the phone works." is a huge thing.
Apple made a decision to go with "it just works." That simplifies and dumbs down what you can do but, for a HUGE number of people, that's vastly more important than wringing every last option out after hours of painful tweaking. To most people, it's a phone with some extra cool features. They'd really like their phone to just work, not need a constant uphill struggle to learn it and then relearn it when next year's model comes out and the carriers dick with everything.
By nerd criteria, Android is vastly superior. By many other people's criteria, the iPhone is superior. The trick is understanding the criteria people judge by and recognizing that just because other people's value systems are not the same as yours, that doesn't make them wrong for using criteria that're different to your own.