I don't think that's a very reasonable thing to say. Samsung-LSI (which is the "Samsung" in question here) consistently makes better BSPs than, say, TI or nvidia (with their big WinCE-like layer inside the kernel).

Samsung Mobile has a reputation for making poor quality Android UIs (though they also have a few other OS projects going on; the EFL one and something else).

Also, Samsung-LSI generally makes better SoCs than the other guys (normally the bus works properly, etc). If you wanted to pick on them in a constructive way then you could say "I hope they clean up their mess in arch/arm..."

You must not have looked at samsung's source for their recent flagship phones.

Samsung-LSI is part of Samsung's semiconductor division, it has little to do with the their consumer electronics section.

I am not saying there are not people within the giant Samsung company capable of this. I am sure there are.

I am saying they will be working against a strong "Samsung is good at hardware, but not at software" reputation.

Yeah. Kies is slow as hell (more than iTunes on windows.. it says a lot, because iTunes on windows is not a shiny example of good software.) and TouchWiz is slowing down Android, sometimes destroying the battery and is otherwise a design sin, it's far more uglier than the stock UI, it's got better recently (S3, Note 10.1 etc.) but it still has some badly copied parts from iOS that doesn't really match Android's aesthetics, like the custom keyboard. The Samsung keyboard has an identical color scheme to iOS's virtual keyboards, it looks good on iOS because the rest of the interface is similar but it feels like total shit on Android and really it just proves that Samsung actually deserved to get bitchslapped in the courts by Apple because even an Android fan like myself could find too many similarities between what Samsung did to Android (it was worse for past devices) and iOS. Stock Android doesn't look like iOS, but TouchzWiz used to, and some parts of TouchWiz still do to this day (like the keyboard I mentioned).

I love Android, and I like some of Samsung's hardware but I wish they'd shut their whole software division down and just put stock android on their phones and tablets. Stop writing code, and stop designing your custom UI, because you SUCK at this job.

Exactly - Apple and Microsoft have struggled mightily with file systems. I've never heard anyone put Samsung in their league in terms of software...