WTF? That's very surprising. This is basically an older memory controller on the Snapdragon version, and also made by Toshiba, which are not as good as Samsung's.
The difference is not huge in speed specs, it is tangible in quality, and I'm surprised that they diversified that much this time (as in more than just the SOC and camera sensor). The thread on XDA is focused on memory access and transfer speeds, but it feels a little bit like back patting, as the Samsung controllers are superior as they are based on their SSD controllers, which have the best garbage collection, wear leveling etc, making them the far better choice for endurance compared to Toshiba's (Rebranded OCZ, actually). If you read reviews of those SSDs and their memory controllers, you'd get the point where the difference lays. Samsung's storage is best rated because their controllers are more advanced and they take better care of the memory.
It would be an exaggeration as the Toshiba controller isn't bad (as it's still UFS, not eMMC), but to present a point, the original Nexus 7 was let down by the memory controller that wore out the memory quickly and made the device almost unusable after months of intense use. Mine took about a minute to launch Chrome and ~5 minutes to update a single app before it ended up in my shelf.
The main problem of mobile storage as far as I'm concerned is that it wears out with time, not that it's slow out of the box, so I'd want the best as far as storage controller is concerned. If phone storage was as advanced as SSDs, 32GB of storage would still wear out 8 times faster than 256GB based on capacity alone, due to wear leveling and the fact that a single memory cell is being written to 8 times more frequently since there's 8 times fewer of them to work with. Add to this the fact that the phone is on 24/7, often comes without SD cards that could give it some breathing room and even Samsung's UFS and Apple's SSD-inspired controllers (while infinitely better than eMMC found on most devices) aren't as advanced as a full fledged SSD drive controller, and you can see why I would care about my phone's memory controller.
As far as tablets are concerned, yeah I think the iPad is the best ARM tablet, surprisingly the Android ones are crippled except of the Galaxy Tab S, which are great but still have really sub par chipsets for some unknown reason.
The point with iPads not selling well for me is that I'm on the original iPad Air and I honestly can't tell a real life difference between that and the iPad Pro, for instance. They look and feel exactly the same, and because even the Air still performs very well, the paper performance difference is not even noticeable in real usage except for game load times. I saw numerous benchmarks only to realize that in real life usage, even the newest games run at the same 60fps on the Air anyway. We can't even talk about things like updated cameras, as that doesn't matter much on tablets, but there's not much more that changed as far as real world usage is concerned over the last 4 years. While that shows how little progress happened on Apple's camp, that also shows how good the original Air was, and that software is still made in mind to work smoothly on older devices, with no killer apps taking advantage of the spare processing power of the newest devices, apart only from cutting edge graphics benchmarks.
