Interesting. I'm thinking that Android vs Apple may be decided on the simple fact that sufficiently-better AI trumps any-amount-better UI. Lawsuits and supposed openness be damned.
That actually seems like a really interesting observation. I've never specifically thought of systems in terms of UI v. AI before, but it makes sense if you think of all operations in any computational system as the result of data manipulation by some "intelligence", and user interface as more specifically the interface between that data and user intelligence.
In a computational system, computational intelligence will be used in all instances possible, until such a point as it is either insufficiently advanced or insufficiently informed to continue without making a call to the user intelligence. Thus, the more advanced a computational intelligence and the more information at its disposal, the less interface with user intelligence necessary. By that reasoning, it follows that the ideal or perfect interface would be one which treats the user purely as a data source (more precisely, as the absolute last data source in the pecking order – one to use when absolutely no other data source accessible could possibly provide the same data or make the same decision with reasonable confidence).
In that sense, it's likely that going forward we'll see UIs moving more in the direction of Now / Wolfram Alpha / Siri and using such mechanisms to manipulate and return greater amounts of information.
* This idea of data being acted upon by intelligences is essentially a generalisation of the canonical algorithms and data structures.
* The argument presented would also explain why anyone accustomed to a certain command line interface will swear by it over most graphical interfaces to the same system (the reason being that commands are usually a much more direct interface between the system and the user intelligence).
I think the UI gap between Apple and Google is either closing rapidly or has already closed. Android looks slicker and more useful every day while iOS is slowly grinding on with the same old app icons and home button.
Which is why it seems to me that introducing Siri was a dumb move for Apple: UI is one of Apple's core competencies, but machine intelligence is pretty much the one thing Google is best at.
But it was smart of Apple to get their product to market first. Waiting for it to be "finished", then being stuck behind Google in ML technology indefinitely, would have been dumb.
