What engineering are you impressed with on Google's side? I'd love to see examples of things to help me erase my painful memories of developing on Android around 1.5/1.6/2.1.
Fragments and the ActionBar. The new holo styles and interface conventions. The flexibility of layouts and the way that activities work. There are some rough edges, to be sure, but it all seems a lot more forward looking than Apple's miniaturization of Cocoa.
Also the new interactive notifications in Jelly Bean are an idea that's long overdue. I think the ability of Android apps to integrate more deeply with the OS is really starting to pay off.
I agree that the flexible layout approach is pretty nice (and obviously we're seeing Apple move towards this direction with autolayout), but I'm not a big fan of the fragment API. They sounded better in theory than they've worked out in practice, IMO.
The inability to nest fragments in other fragments makes doing certain things like fragment based tabs or viewpagers rather awkward. And since the fragment lifecycle almost but doesn't quite match up with the activity lifecycle, some extra careful bookkeeping is required to make sure state is transferred properly upon rotation since the entire thing gets destroyed and recreated.
Anyway, the biggest problem for me on Android is that although the new APIs in 3.0 and 4.0 are pretty sweet, I can't use most of them due to having to maintain compatibility back to 2.2 (Froyo). ActionBarSherlock and the compatibility library help a bit, but it's not quite the same.
Which APIs specifically are you missing that aren't in the compat libraries? I agree that Google should be putting in more effort here and not leaving it up to a third party to come up with a backported action bar implementation but so far I've had pretty good luck with the compat libs.
I also agree that there are some rough edges in the fragments API but it's nothing like the mess that view controller containment is on iOS.
These both feel like hacks and since Apple can't ever be bothered to backport anything I can't use them until my clients are willing to commit to iOS 6-only releases. Thanks to the maps fiasco I don't see that happening until some time next year.
