Re: Nice phone but...
Aren't you forgetting that each brand (be it a phone, car etc. manufacturer) typically has its own in-house design style/language which is applied across several versions of its product, and the result of this can be that two essentially identical things (phones, cars etc.) can end up feeling significantly different to use purely because of how those manufacturer-specific design elements fit in with your personal outlook on what said thing ought to look/behave like...
There are some cars I would never buy purely because I don't like how the controls are arranged, even though essentially they're exactly the same cars (engine size, load carrying capabilities etc.) as the ones I would buy, and that's before you start getting into purely trivial stuff like whether you think the car looks nice or not (and yes, shallow as it may sound, there are some cars I'd never buy on that point alone, no matter how close to perfection their interior layout might be).
Same with phones - having spent my entire smartphone-owning life using phones designed by (if not always badged as) HTC, I now find myself struggling to accept how any other type of phone looks or feels in use unless it's so close to how HTC do it that it doesn't matter. Every time my wife or one of the kids asks me to sort out something on their variety of Samsung phones, the difference in how the softkeys are arranged (HTC puts back on the left, Samsung puts it on the right) causes me no end of problems due to my now deeply ingrained muscle memory for where I expect those controls to be, and that's before you then get into all the other tweaks they choose to apply to the stock Android experience - config settings being located in different places, some settings only being available on one or the other phone but not both etc.