re: Apple has guts...

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android runs on dalvik vm, which functions as an intermediary between android applications and the hardware itself. conversely, iOS used objective C, which means that executed applications run directly on the hardware, with no translation required.

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Which contributes to a fine case for using multi-core CPUs. It's definitely obvious that Android needs more resources at its disposal to run as it was designed vs. what iOS needs to do what it allows. However, worth noting that Lollipop replaced Dalvik with Android Runtime, which, based on it description, appears to be much more efficient than JIT compilation. But the Nexus 6 is my first Android device (7 years of iphones prior to that), so I can't exactly attest to its real-world improvement.

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this isn't to say iOS is inherently faster...just far more efficient and far more optimized.

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It's one of the top benefits of proprietary hardware and software, in addition to a highly restricted environment (saving the user from himself, which is not a bad thing). But good memory management, as efficient as it may be, does not change the requirements and usage of third party apps (or even Safari, since memory consumption is not consistent from site to site). If all Objective C is doing is unloading apps from memory to free up memory, it stands to reason that more memory = less unloading = better multitasking, which is rarely something measured in benchmarks. That's really it. If the iPhone has a bottleneck, it's the RAM, but bottleneck does not mean slow.