As a fan of both Apple products and Android phones, I hate seeing so much hate pushed around like this. Honestly I think it's even worse than the old school Mac bashing, only worse because phones for some odd reason are also seen as fashion accessories.
It is natural that most Android phones have less R&D time (thus, love) put into them; Most android phones are developed as a 'series' and have a unique variant for every carrier in the US, plus a few more variants around the world. There are probably more variants of the Samsung Galaxy S II than there have been models of iPhone produced!
I'll also agree there are a lot of shoddy 3rd party programs out there. Meebo strikes me as one of those that I've been meaning to get rid of but using anyway (it crashes every time I try to access it from the notification screen!)
The OS itself? I dunno, my (soon to be 2 year old) G2 can still pull about 2 days of battery life depending on how I use it. It did that with the stock version of 2.2 it came with, and with CM7. Development on the ICS build for that phone (of course, by the community, not by HTC or T-Mobile) has lead to a build I might start using in the next month or so.
The resale value hasn't been bad either. Yea, it was worth about $200-250 after I got it from T-Mobile for free for being a loyal customer. Surprisingly, it's still worth about $150 on ebay. (holy crap!) The only difference in resale is that $200 I didn't spend.
It works and it's been really durable. Will I go android again next time around? I might very well. I like how tightly integrated it is with Google Voice & Gmail, and having things like quick dial icons on the home screen is a nice touch (something I haven't seen on iOS or WP7).