Specs wise its definetly not the best around. In fact, I find myself looking out more what the next Galasy S is about than the iphone.

Outside of screen size (if you care about that), you'll be hard-pressed to find a smoother device than the iPhone 5. It's benchmarking crazy-high, does it all in a small package, and still delivers excellent battery life. People are overlooking just how amazing a package this phone is from a hardware perspective (iOS6 is pretty meh). It's competing with (and beating most) 4.6-4.8" phones in many regards, which is amazing considering how much smaller and lighter the phone is (while still using premium components of metal and glass, unlike most plastic-covered Android phones).

Apple looks to have a winner on its hands with the ARMv7-based chip. It's on par with what we can expect from the A15 cores but in a much smaller and more power-efficient package (and with only two cores). Kudos to Apple for having the balls to design their own chip and bring it to market.

Most of the reviews I read acknowledge the world outside of iPhone. In general:
"If you didn't like the iOS before, you won't like the new iPhone"

Yeah, if you look hard enough, you will succeed in finding reviews that have a similar opinion to yours.

And indeed, those talk about specs...  Some people are into numbers, and take them at face value.  Yet the Benchmark tests released so far has the iPhone 5 faring better than all the phones on the marked right now, even the Android favorite SIII television set, even though the iPhone 5's specs are supposedly lower.  

Then there's this that should be taken into account, partly explaining the price of the device:

How objective: a review that compares a single phone to the combined feature lists of all of its competitors, without actually naming one that can beat it.

Well I've got one, and all I can say is that it's amazing.

I typed this using Siri

By the way, here are some tests of the iPhone 5 versus the US dual-core SIII:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2410034,00.asp

Spoiler alert: the Galaxy doesn't do very well, especially considering its ability to use a MUCH higher frequency processor due to its larger physical size and battery capacity. People who are dismissing the iPhone 5's hardware just aren't paying attention to what Apple did with the device. It's bloody impressive.

ARM doesn't have the money to design fast processors (their per-unit revenue is only 5 cents). I think we'll see an Apple vs Qualcomm vs Samsung custom core war soon enough. Wouldn't be surprised if one of those three buys AMD as well.

I'm pretty sure Samsung doesn't have an ARM license to create their own chips. Apple snapped up one of the few licensors who can produce custom cores (Qualcomm is obviously another).

Agreed, but they have the capability, cash and motivation to do so if stock ARM cores start falling behind Apple and Snapdragon in performance/watt. The purchase of an architecture license is trivial to them.