Taylor Wimberly regarding Android device upgrade paths:

Some phones could be missing features of Android 2.1 (live wallpapers), but they will all have an Android 2.1 firmware. Now let me cut to the bad news. Select Android phones will require a wipe when they are upgraded to Android 2.1. I actually only know of phones that will require a wipe, so it could include all of them (minus the Droid which is already on Android 2.0.1).

There are a lot of things that I love about the iPhone platform but let me mention a few of them.

• Nearly every time I sync my iPhone or iPod touch with iTunes it gets backed up. So even if a firmware upgrade wipes my device, I can always get my data back.
• I’ve been able to update every single iPhone OS device I have, including my first generation iPhone and third generation iPod touch, to the latest version of iPhone OS.
• I have no doubt in my mind that when the next firmware update is released, I’ll be able to upgrade all of them.

Just the idea that the device your using might not be able to update is totally wild. Might I point out that Android is open source, being unsure about device updates shouldn’t happen when the code is free, and yet it does.