I have an iPad, and it's great. Darkhoodness, I must say most of your ponts are untrue
, you ARE able to use your existing music on iOS (you claim your friend had to repurchase all their music through itunes - this is simply untrue).
Nate's previous post is right. I'd bet a $trillion that pretty much all big companies use cheap labour to manufacture their product lines.
I find Apple products to be beautifully designed, fast and fluid. Apple write their own operating system (iOS) specifically for their own-designed hardware, which is how they manage to get such speedy performance. Safari, in particular, is nice to use (previous to iOS 6.0, anyway). iOS 6 seems quite buggy for me, I'm hoping they get it fixed soon.
If you don't want to spend money in the iOS ecosystem, then you don't have to. Only buy apps that you KNOW you will use. I've made the mistake of impulsively buying apps in the past for iOS believing they'll be great and that I'll get loads of use out of them, only to use them a few times, and then never again. I haven't purchased anything from itunes / Apple in months, yet I use my iPad everyday, yes, everyday, and it's brilliant for what I want to use it for (pretty much just web browsing daily, music)
Apple do like to boast about how many apps they have in their store. The reality is that 99.9% of them are just crap and irellevant to the individual user.. But I think that's the case with android too (and windows phone, bless..)