Samsung specific, however these apps can be hidden if they bother you that much, or at least they can on my HTC. Besides, i thought u weren't talking about supplied application? This is replaceable if desired.
I would say a friggin flipboard app is considerably less annoying than an entire maps application thats not worth squat.
I have seen iOS act pretty choppy aswell once there is a few things running in the background. Previously android has been a blot more choppy, but 4.1 Actually improves this a lot, alternative launchers can perform better than the default one aswell.
One thing people say to me when they see it go a bit choppy is... watch my iphone doesnt do that and im like... yeah but that's just a load of icons for apps, not widgets running actual programs. iPhones DO NOT have this feature and until they do you have to compare app draw to app draw which is in the most part, exactly the same.
I imagine widgets are a pretty difficult thing to get working smoothly which is why iOS doesnt have them yet. In my mind this puts apple behind android, significantly.
Major for you... if it was major for the masses it would have been fixed. Don't think i experience it and if i do, it doesn't bother me.
Smartphone specific gripe really, all of them could do with working on battery life although remember the screen is pretty big and pretty bright on the S3. Takes a fair amount of power to juice that up, apple dont have anything near that kind of screen size to drive. Dont really see the problem with using 3rd party apps to imporve your battery life, especially when (and feel free to correct me) the comparative solution doesn't exist in iPhone world.
I would also add inter-app integration into the mix, iOS doesnt do a very good job of this (outside stock apple apps) at all whilst android is decent-ish. Not great and i have found a few annoying things with it recently but its got a decent starting point.
Still waiting for the 'million miles away' example if im honest mate. Pretty even playing field where each take hits in different areas, personal usage determines which of these hits affects you most.