My thoughts follow along lines similar to the reasoning in John Boyd’s recent post:

“… the smartphone experience is rapidly becoming mass market and main stream and as that trend continues, people will want more choice, more hardware and performance. In short, in early cycles, Apple’s strategy of control is usually going to be superior but as a technology becomes mainstream, it fails.

We’ve seen the model for this in Apple’s early years, where people favored Apple over the PC. People thought Apple was unbeatable but they were eventually driven to the point where people started looking at the cash value on the balance sheet.

Eventually as people became comfortable with the PC World, they didn’t want to be controlled anymore. Even the least savvy technical users wanted more choice in hardware and applications as their comfort level rose.”

I love what Apple has accomplished with the iPhone, just like I loved my first Mac 128k (no hard drive, just the floppy).  However, I’m afraid that the challenge presented by the diverse teams contributing to the Android+hardware ecosystem will simply be overwhelming. 

The aforementioned HTC Passion, based on a 1 GHz Snapdragon, is just the latest example of how fast this juggernaut is moving.  With iPhone OS as a template, and the vast resources working on Android+hdw, the solutions will evolve quickly and will pass the “good enough” mark in very short order.  Given its relative carrier independence, Android+hdw will absolutely present a challenge to the iPhone hegemony.