Why do people keep defending Windows Phones for being underpowered with this rationale? How well the phone runs the OS is not why we want better processing power so quit saying we don't need more processing power because the OS runs fine. More CPU, memory, and better graphics performance are for running increasingly complex apps better(And before anyone says "What intensive apps on Windows Phone?" there aren't many(any) because there aren't powerful Windows phones...). Heck just web browsing isn't that good even now if you go on any remotely system intensive website even on a Snapdragon 600 phone.
On Windows Phone: We don't need to keep pushing higher and higher clocked CPUs, more cores, and beyond "retina" displays at the same time
at this current rate, not if the OS and the vast majority of apps can get by with less. Not in the mobile space. Right now the only Android phones that can give more than 8 hours of battery life and have the current generation of Snapdragon processors are large phablet or near-phablet sized phones, and not everyone wants that. Nor the amount of heat generated by these phones (I have a One - it gets very warm when the CPU/GPU runs demanding games/apps, and the S4 gets hot and/or throttles).
I'm all for faster and faster phones with more features and capabilities, but I haven't seen a need to push faster than current battery tech has progressed. Just look at the phone most reviewers are saying has good battery life and runs about as fast as the GS4 in practical use: the Moto X, which doesn't possess the very highest clocked Snapdragon 800 processor or 3GB of RAM. There are plenty of other optimizations and ways to cleverly design phones to get better performance without simply throwing more power into a phone (though in the Moto X's case, additional cores may have helped, but not at the expense of battery life).
If you look at the Gingerbread era of Android phones, just more and more megahertz did squat to help Android phones compete against iPhone. I don't think there was a magic level of hardware advancement that suddenly fixed things; it was the combination of incremental hardware improvements
and OS-level improvements from Jelly Bean that made things much, much smoother. No one is saying Windows Phone needs to stay stagnant with hardware, it just doesn't need to be at the very forefront in order to be a very good platform.
You can put xx GHz in a phone and keep adding more and more RAM, but it doesn't help if the phone is throttling because of thermal constraints or if you are unable to use even half the RAM because it's simply hard to have enough apps running to do that. The RAM is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation to be sure, but remember adding any hardware increases the cost of the phone to the consumer even if it doesn't cost the manufacturer much. And frankly I'd take a phenomenal 41-megapixel phone with 2GB of RAM than a 2.2 GHz phone with 3GB of RAM which has no other feature of the same caliber. Things will change in the future for sure, but I don't see why Window Phone needs to have the maximum specs. They might sound good on paper but usually come with requirements or drawbacks.
If web browsing is unacceptable to you right now on phones, I would argue that's something that needs to be improved on the software/browser side and even the network side. I have no issues on any of the phones I have. I don't think it's reasonable to say web browsing is a case where the hardware isn't good enough even on lower end phones. My Lumia 521 handles web pages pretty snappily, nearly as quickly to me (though I haven't benchmarked it) as any of the Android phones I've used. And that's a dirt cheap Windows Phone. The equivalent Android phones may have better hardware but aren't as smooth or consistent. The lower end of the market is one area where you can see Windows Phone has an advantage over Android, where the cry for higher specs will actually price you out of the market or give you a subpar overall experience.
If you want max specs, by all means go for a flagship Android phone that pushes the envelope. There are the ~6.0" phones out there and on the horizon that do just that. There's nothing wrong with choosing that route, just as there is nothing wrong with choosing a Windows Phone with "underpowered" specifications. But I don't see a 41-Megapixel Android phone at this time, nor do I see Android phones as good as the Windows Phones and as unique at the low and mid range. So I think there is room for both strategies and approaches. I have Android and Windows phones. I'm sure part of the hardware lag isn't intentional or permanent - remember that Android wasn't always leaps and bounds ahead of Apple in every area. Especially in the camera area, where phones like the One, GS4, Xperia Z, and G2 have only just starting to get competitive against the iPhone.