kinda funny considering just how much ICS mimics TouchWiz from 1-2 years ago, and lol @ the whole "sure you can root" bla bla etc, i mean, if someone isn't going to root etc, and use custom roms why would they even want a Nexus? for the latest and greatest? surely they'd be fine with a HTC Rhyme...
Coming from the 'Get an iPhone' guy, I can't really take your opinions seriously.
WOW....still so wrong..
Seem like just because the nexus is more expensive and newer it should be the first choice over the GS2. ALOT of people can afford both phone but they decide to stick with the GS2 because they believe its still the phone to beat. Most XDA people will agree with this. Even the Annadtech review doesn't recommend the nexus for long time commitment because of the under spec hardware.
There's nothing wrong with touchwiz to begin with.
And what wrong with rooting and custom rom? Therese no drawback on rooting and putting custom roms at all. Just because its official it doesn't mean it wont have bugs or stability issues. Look at 4.0.1...if 4.0.3 wasn't available from custom roms i would have thrown the Gnex out of the window...
I think if you read my post you'll find nowhere where I say the phone is better because it is more expensive or newer. I made the reasons clear above.
The Anandtech review says the hardware is underspec'd - But underspec'd for what? Which applications are massively dependent on 1.2ghz dual core processors for now? WP7 runs on single cores just fine! Is the Quad Core Tegra 3 more powerful? Yes it is! Which would be fair if Android seemed sluggish or slow on the Galaxy Nexus, but that isn't the case.
I see no pressing reason in the next 18 months for quad core on a phone except on very high resolution displays beyond 720p, which is frankly unnecessary except on tablets.
As for what is wrong with Touchwiz? I'm aware this is subjective but looking at Touchwiz on a GS2 compared to Holo on ICS 4.0 - The look and feel is worlds away. I'll give some credit to Samsung for not overdoing it on the tablets, but they have still replaced all the stock icons with some really ugly stuff and the choice of colours is garish. The functionality of Touchwiz itself is fine, but the design really is some kind of bastard iOS/Android lovechild.
As for what's wrong with rooting? Nothing really. Except that in a lot of cases unless you have a lot of spare time it's actually a frustrating experience. In previous versions of Android I've felt the need to root to get some kind of missing functionality or theme-ing that wasn't present in stock. I've rooted the HTC Hero, Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus and frankly I reached the point where I was bored of Titanium and Nandroid backups and roms that simply would bug out or cause system applications to crash at crucial moments.
People generally root for 4 reasons:
1: Updates that carriers/oems are either unwilling or slow to provide
2: To add functionality missing from their device
3: To theme their device
4: Fun
I think the Galaxy Nexus even as a developer device is the first Android phone that really doesn't need to be rooted except for fun. I know some are rooting for extra battery or speed neither of which I think are problematic on the Nexus for the majority of use cases. Some are rooting because Google have stalled the 4.03 release for further testing. I have nothing against rooting per se, but the reasons to do so have decreased significantly with every release of Android as the team have built in features previously only available in custom roms/launchers.
That's my opinion of course and I understand your reasons for dis-agreeing, but I'd be confident enough to say that if a neutral had both phones for 2 weeks the Galaxy Nexus would be their phone of choice.