It's more than simple form factor. Apple's hardware integration work too is way beyond what the Android OEMs are doing, too.
One of the complaints in the article is battery life, and that's dead on. My wife's 4S routinely lasts all day. Occasionally she forgets to plug it in and in the morning it's crossed 24h of uptime with a little power to spare until she can plug it in at work. My Galaxy Nexus with the extended battery (7.77WH vs. 5.3 in the iPhone) will never make 24h without special attention (e.g. airplane mode, disable sync, etc...). And it's routine on days of slightly-heavier-than-normal usage for it to die before I plug it in at bedtime.
Some of that effect is simply the larger backlight (75% more screen area on the Nexus), but surely not all of it. Power management in iOS is just plain better than it is in the Android world, and quite noticeably so.
For me, that's an acceptable trade for Android's deeper features and hackability. But I won't say I don't wish it did a little better, and wouldn't begrudge someone making a product decision based on it.
For whatever it's worth: I got a Motorola Droid RAZR M a few months back, explicitly because it's not gigantic and I don't like gigantic phones.
It gets 24+ hours of battery life, even though I play Ingress a few hours a day (though I don't do much else that's heavily battery draining). It is not gigantic. It is presently on Android 4.1, and while it's not the entirely pure Android experience you'd get with a Nexus, it's not that far off.
The screen isn't anywhere near as pretty as an iPhone's, and the build quality is probably inferior (but, honestly, plenty high for me).
One of the complaints in the article is battery life, and that's dead on. My wife's 4S routinely lasts all day. Occasionally she forgets to plug it in and in the morning it's crossed 24h of uptime with a little power to spare until she can plug it in at work. My Galaxy Nexus with the extended battery (7.77WH vs. 5.3 in the iPhone) will never make 24h without special attention (e.g. airplane mode, disable sync, etc...). And it's routine on days of slightly-heavier-than-normal usage for it to die before I plug it in at bedtime.
Some of that effect is simply the larger backlight (75% more screen area on the Nexus), but surely not all of it. Power management in iOS is just plain better than it is in the Android world, and quite noticeably so.
For me, that's an acceptable trade for Android's deeper features and hackability. But I won't say I don't wish it did a little better, and wouldn't begrudge someone making a product decision based on it.