It isn't android. It's the manufacturer skins. AOSP Jellybean runs really smooth on my low end phone. (512 MB ram, 600 MHz processor) But HTC Sense 4 runs like crap.
It's a bit of both. The original Galaxy S (which was only a year and a half old at the time, and was a top-of-the-line phone) struggled really hard with stock android ICS for me.
All products will in the future have underlying and derivative components. The market for derivatives will soon explode (just like finance). The optimsing business will sell a portfolio of products f(U,D). And price each accordingly. digital technology allows for radically cheaper (and thus more experimentally plentiful) derivative productization. Thus, we will see an explosion of more profitable derivative products. Having zero-charge product or zero-charge derivative variants, will be the edge case.
Advertising is just a more trivial case derivative. But information gathering (pretexted: customer servive) can easily be repacked (consumer intelligence) and set to the highest bidder. Because there is de-minimus incremental complexity to the U product business, entry into the D derivative business makes sense both from a profit and a strategy perspective as costs of digital platform tools decreases (and/or skills, toold, expertise becomes more widespread.)
You may wanna read up on what free software actually is. The free used by the FSF generally denotes that you have access to the source code and are free to modify and redistribute it.
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Haskell#Haskell_Code_Exam...
It's like using code from the IOCCC to make a point that C code is not maintainable.