That is exactly where a geek differs from a noob. A geek likes to experiment with his phone. Flashing roms is fun. Using different types of UIs and everything.
If you like the UI of the iphone so much then with an android phone you can get the same UI on a better and bigger screen with faster insides.
If you are talking about software updates, every android phone has unlimited number of ROMS.
Specially Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus.
I have the Nexus S and I am using a Jelly Bean rom. It has improved my battery life and my phone is much faster now and also boots up quicker.
As for live wallpapers, they are fun to have but you get bored easily. But they are just another feature over the iOS. Widgets are very important. The torch light widget on my phone with the regular soccer score update widget on my homescreen is more important than the icons.
The notification bar is way more customizable compared to ios.
Then the biggest thing is worldwide support. Apple provides excellent support in US. But what about the other countries. Here in India once the iPhone is released we have to pay $1000 for an unlocked iPhone which is our only option. And compared to that the S3 is available for $700 with a quad core and a bigger screen. Specs which eat the iphone alive. The Galaxy Nexus is available for $400 again with better specs than iPhone and a lot more room for experiments.
Then SIRI does not work in India. The iphone voice recognition does not work with an Indian accent. But Google's voice recognition works so nicely with Indian Accents. The jellybeans new search features work so well in India. Then there are the maps. I am pretty sure India won't get voice navigation with the iphone. They might be able to manage the US maps well, but other country maps will be handled pathetically.
Android has now the support of a huge chunk of the open source community and those people are like some of the best programmers in the world. So no matter how screwed up your phone gets by some bad flashing or whatever, there is always a solution.
Then the itunes thing, which forces me to install windows(I use GNU/linux) to run itunes properly to transfer apps and other things. Apple has the biggest database of Users with their credit card numbers, even with this information being a common knowledge, people still think that "Innovation" is what Apple seeks.
The other thing is the other day a friend of mine wanted a document which was on my phone and we were in an area which had no internet connectivity. He had an iPhone, at that time I was not able to send the document to him over bluetooth because to my surprise I discovered you cannot do so. I was not able to transfer a document from an android phone to an iphone over bluetooth. That is what $1000 gets you.
Although there is one good thing about the new iPhone. It has shut all the fans up.
But getting into extreme customization is far less of a hassle, and far less risky on iOS. Rooting is downright stressful next to jailbreaking, and Cydia provides one massive community for mods and tweaks. Tweaking a jailbroken iOS device is much more enjoyable, for me at least, than an Android device.
How is tweaking anything fun without opening a couple of tabs of the terminal(the linux/unix shell) on your computer.