Stats show that Apple retain their customers much better than Android. Anecdotal doesn't mean much.
Razor thin? 7.6mm isn't thin enough for you? Its one of the thinnest phones you can get.
Apple doesn't make a change unless they know for sure its what will make the device better. Have you seen a history of their products or their website? For the most part it doesn't change much.
This is their discipline in keeping things simple. Throwing the kitchen sink in with phones XYZ giga megahz isn't their style. Their product names reflect that as well and doesn't read like a serial number.
Focus is what saved their company from disappearing, they're not going to give that up.
People say Apple is slow to change, or uses slow change to hype up changes that have been made in the Android world or on other OSes. Whatever the theory is, in the end it works out pretty well.
During the iOS4 launch, Steve said that they may not be the first to implement things, but it works damn well. Sure we made fun of them for copy and paste, but the Android implementation was piss poor til Gingerbread came out. People laughed at them for multitasking, yet Android's memory management system isn't perfect and takes 2gb RAM or massive specs in general to make it decent. People made fun of them for MMS which didn't come til iOS4, yet Android messaging apps fail at MMS left and right. Hell group MMS didn't hit til Android 4.2.
You don't HAVE to be the first one there especially if your implementation is meh at best. It's like saying Android had dual core CPUs first, but what good did that do? I guess it made the OS less of a lagfest. But in the end the lag issue required OS level changes as well as yet even faster CPUs like Kraits and quad cores to solve.
So yeah, I do want Apple to pick up the pace and jump in, but its slow and steady pace hasn't really hurt it too much. Sure they may not be market leaders, but their products to me are pretty well polished and if you look at the evolution since 2007, they've come a LONG way.
People are just giving it flak for the big screen. If they released a 4.5" phone instead, I bet a lot of the criticism would go away, and we would be even more focused on the 5C pricing.