Why it's better than the S3 for me? The battery isn't dead by noon. I had an S3 for about a week-and-a-half and tried to fix/adjust every setting on it to save battery. Nothing worked. I had to uninstall a bunch of apps and couldn't have push Facebook notifications or anything. With all of that, I was lucky to still have a working phone by 2:00 P.M. Otherwise, it would be DEAD before noon.
Several other S3 owners at work have crap batteries as well.
I had exactly the same issues with the battery on my (now sold) S3. No matter what I did to try and conserve battery, it would be absolutely dead by 6pm. Even on airplane mode with every notification, alarm, push and app closed, and with power save enabled, the phone would be dead within twenty four hours even if I left the phone alone completely and didn't touch it at all. I know this as I tested it one day to find out. I've documented my S3 trials and tribulations on here in a few posts and frankly I am so glad to be shot of the S3 and to now own a phone that 'just works'.
I think a great part of iPhone success is the OS, is just a such integration in between what does of the iPhone a better phone.
I will say too, beautiful design, gorgeous touchscreen, and always a decent battery life.
I agree with you totally on that. For me, the biggest selling point of a phone is whether the OS actually works well. As my S3 used to fall over constantly to the point where I couldn't rely on any apps, even stock ones (stock alarm failed to wake me up on occasion, having forced closed overnight for no readily apparent reason).
For my needs, iOS isn't flawless but it is an order of magnitude better than Android. I miss some aspects of my Android interface, like the sheer customisation options of the UI and the settings, both built in and with apps such as Tasker. Unless of course I jailbreak the iPhone, which looks incredibly scary and complicated from what my limited brain can glean from the Jailbreak forums. Anyway, no iOS 6 JB exists for the iPhone 5 yet and even when it does I will likely leave it a long while for the early adopters to find and fix all the flaws before I even contemplate it.