My hypothesis is that people who are comparing iPhone to Android, actually don't want to switch. They have to find some problem, so they don't have to.
And why should they switch? I don't know. If you're happy with your phone and the way it works, you shouldn't switch. It seems they want the Android phone to be an iPhone. But it isn't. And it shouldn't try to be. It's something different.
When you read about people wanting to switch to an Android phone, they will say that the iPhone has the most applications. Last thing I heard about this was that the iPhone has about 100.000 applications and Android about 16.000 to 20.000. This is only a factor five. That one number is bigger than the other is obvious. But is that the best way to compare these two app stores?
I think it's better to compare the app stores, or the applications, by comparing the different applications. If the iPhone App Store has five times as many applications, because many applications have copies that do almost the same thing, can you then talk about having more applications? I don't think so. It's true that there are more actual applications, but that doesn't make the iPhone itself more useful.
You could also think of it this way: if you can have every applications that you want on the Android phones, then it doesn't matter how many applications its App Store has.