I really don't like the painting of business leaders as heroes, but here it feels a little bit appropriate: I bet steve jobs would have fired you on the spot for this. And the managers under him would have never dared to do this and still don't.
Even with higher performing chips on some Samsung phones, the iPhone always feels faster.
Most consumers don't care about how performant the chip is, but they do care about visible performance.
Go compare a Mac in 1998 vs. a garbage-tier shopping mall Windows machine. Apple almost died for a reason.
It's a little silly to criticize their argument, then. Android is not a uniform experience because it runs on everything. Your Raspberry Pi can boot Android with the right drivers. It certainly won't be your "iPhone is an iPhone is an iPhone" experience, but that's because the AOSP exists. It's reductive and a non-argument.
Now, you also don't need to go build a fresh AOSP image or install GrapheneOS to argue in good faith. That being said, if you have to make vendors look like the boogeyman to win an online argument about cell phones, you're likely building a case that works equally well against Apple.
Samsung is the top/biggest Android manufacturer from everything I can find online and all the other non-Pixel phones are equally trashy (full of crapware, reskinned apps, etc). The Pixel is almost a rounding error in North America coming in at ~2% vs Samsung at ~30% and Apple at about ~54% [0]. I think it's perfectly fair to judge the OS based on the biggest install base.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/north-...
And not the designer of the OS? I guess that's fair enough, but you should be mad at Samsung then. Google licenses Android to thousands of manufacturers, and all of them can modify it. That's a non-argument though, like I was saying. Again, you don't need a Pixel to argue in good faith here, you're just being mad at the entirely wrong party.
I'm coming at this both as a user and as a developer. My iOS apps or web pages generally have a bug or they don't across all of iOS, the same is not true for Android. I pay for BrowserStack first and foremost so I can test my app on the exact make/model/OS of Android that a user has who reports an issue (or that comes from Sentry). There are differences in the iOS versions but I've rarely been bitten by that whereas I have been for Android a number of times (normally due to Samsung vs Google vs Other, even if they are all the "same" Android version).
You're absolutely correct, every major Apple architectural change has been motivated in large part by performance.
For example, the MacUser cover introducing PowerPC was "FASTEST EVER! PowerPC Macs • Five Times Faster • Outperforms Pentium". Apple was effectively forced to move to Intel because IBM fabrication caused PowerPC to fall behind performance goals. And of course, performance continues to be a primary motivation behind the move to Apple Silicon.
On that note, it might've just been my imagination, but I swear that OS X 10.5/10.6 had a different responsiveness profiles on PowerPC and Intel Macs. Somehow Core 2 Duo Macs that on paper and in benchmarks outstripped the single core PPC G5 Macs they replaced quite significantly on every metric felt noticeably less responsive with more frequent beachballing. Really weird.
The top line performance of the M chips is obviously fantastic per se, but probably more important for most use cases is that performance also being delivered reliably and dependably for a day (ish) on a single charge.
The combo of those two is a massively bigger win for most people than simply a little bit of extra incremental perf Vs the last gen, or whatever.