I would say it's more the power of incentives, really. Android has historically never had the performance investment that Apple has put on their platform. If anything, early Android was much closer to iOS in terms of hardware specs and diverged quickly as they were unable to keep their resource usage down.
I wouldn't call the JIT, AOT and PGO efforts nothing, and stuff like project butter.
On the other hand going with a basic Assembly interpreter for Dalvik, when Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had JIT compilers for Symbian, while claming Android was better, no comments.
Likewise when comparing Symbian Series 60 3rd edition phones with Android.
