Is DPI scaling ok on Mac OSX? I always heard the mantra of how you should always run at native res. Maybe that was a Windows XP thing because supposedly Windows 7 fixed things? Now how does it work on retina MBP?
Also how's the lag? I remember the last time I played with the Macbooks, they still felt quite laggy at their retina resolution. I love retina in terms of display quality but I hate lag. I'd rather go with a 1680x1050 MBP sometimes because I find that perfect for a laptop.
My friend has the rMBP, it looks native at every res. He also says that the lag is not an issue, and he's a nit-picker, so I trust him. I haven't used it for more than a few minutes though, it's his precious.
Considering the iPhone was a ground-breaking product, by definition everybody else was well behind of iOS at one point or another. But roughly speaking, if Google made up a 2 year deficit in... oh just about two years, that suggests iOS has been "stagnant". Arguably the two biggest memories of iOS 5 and 6 are the release of beta-quality Siri and Maps debacle, respectively.
There's no doubt uncertainty resulting from the sacking of iOS chief Scott Forstall (reportedly over the Maps flop) and replacing him with the chief industrial designer. Window dressing or premature beta-level feature releases won't cut it anymore. It's too late now to alter the tentpole features in iOS 7, but Apple really needs to step up its game in the face of Android's faster release cycles.
Forstall was fired (allegedly) because he wouldn't apologize. Apple needed to do their own maps, and at a certain point they had to get it into the public's hands. Maps itself is not a debacle, but how they handled the whole thing was. They touted it as being amazing and perfect, and awesome and instead it was not any of those.
Siri... they made it clear that it was beta from day 1, so of course it was beta quality. I don't use it a whole lot, because it is still in beta. They need to open up the API and make it faster. Google's Voice Search on iOS may or may not be faster (I think it is), but it
feels faster because it starts doing stuff right away. It's transcribing it live in front of you which really make it feel like it is more responsive.
At the end of the day, I mostly agree with you, Apple needs to step up their game. But now that Android is catching up to iOS, I don't think it is going to rocket past for a couple of reasons, and will instead just sort of level off.