I'm going to give one more example. I'll give an example of an established Smartphone, one which would do it the way some here would prefer. It's called the iPhone. iPhone users are pretty used to the idea of having one major software update per year. Now yes, there may be minor updates from time to time, but the major updates, the major revisions are yearly. iPhone buyers know where they stand. New iPhone, new OS versions annually.
Now lets take one of he worst culprits of Android updating, the HTC Hero, released first in Europe in July 2009, on Android 1.5. Now, about 1 year later it's finally about to receive an update to 2.1. It's not a gimped version of 2.1 either, with the exception of live wallpapers it's the real deal. So even in pretty much one of the worst case scenarios you got a major OS revision within a year, which matches the iPhone cycle. Now of course, it's not a like for like comparison. iPhone users have only known the details of OS4 for a month or two (but they knew it was coming a year ago). Whereas Android 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1 have come within that same time for HTC Hero owners who have seen handsets running these newer versions of Android. The 3GS will not be getting all the features of OS4, whereas Hero owners are getting all the features of 2.1. So who got the raw deal?
It's simply that the pace of Android development has been so fast, hardware companies have struggled to keep up - But if Android hadn't developed as fast the iPhone would still clearly have the best mobileOS, The Droid wouldn't have happened in America yet, the mindshare wouldn't be there and we'd have Windows7 blowing Android out of the water before it had really even got started. That's where we find ourselves today. Besides all of this Google have pretty much confirmed that development will now slow down to likely Bi-Annual updates from 2011 and with it the fragmentation argument should once and for all disappear.