The thing about widgets, is - they're NOT necessarily up to date!
I think my phone refreshes my email widget every 15 minutes? For news, I often have to press the "refresh" button in order to get the most recent news.
Sure, you could set some of them to check for information more frequently, but to what affect on the battery? And is THAT really worth it?
I think widgets (news, email, weather) are nice until you spend time with them, and realize you have to refresh the information more often than not, to see the most recent available. (or suffer reduced battery performance).
You might as well just click the individual weather/news/email app, and see up to date information, when you actually want it. And the plus side with iOS - the apps are much more optimized/polished than what's on Android, due to not having such a split in the hardware.
I've owned many Android tablets (beginning with the Xoom), and was one of the Android tablet fanboys, but - there's a reason I've switched to Apple.