I think controls which hide a significant part of your screen when you are using them is enough to qualify them as "worse". On some rare occasions if makes sense to have them but most of the time they just get in the way of the visible area of the game and seriously restrict what you can do. And let's not forget there is simply no feedback when you press on a touchscreen vs regular buttons, which is another factor that makes it really bad in terms of usability.
That's also why you see so many initiatives (like Ouya, Icontrolpad 1 & 2) aiming at bringing physical controls to tablets and phones.
Underpowered is a big deal. Before game makers were always pushing to do better looking, better working games and so on, and since we fall in the casual games bubble it has just become an endless flow of "meh" games not very enjoyable nor technically impressive. It is similar to what happened to the car businesses: it used to be a passion where most cars were built to reach top speeds and look cool and slowly became mass-market, fridge and washing machine like business with slow cars designed like shoe-boxes. It's just lame.
Getting traction is not the only thing that matters in life. Making a difference in an existing market is. You are more likely to make a difference on a desktop market with a great game than the same on the phone, just because it is so easy for everyone to publish crap on it. That's what the Introversion guys are doing and while they are on very limited resources they just strive to make better and better games for the desktop. They deserve more credit than they get.
I'm actually happy that a lot of games are moving to 'under powered' devices. Most of my favorite games come from when limitations in the platform forced simple, well designed gameplay. With new (or even old at this point), computers, you can hide these elements behind fancy graphics,and it is much harder to pick out the good games.
Also, my 'under powered' phone has a faster CPU, and more ram than by x-box.
About your last point: your underpowered Phone is incapable of displaying the same level of game details as your xbox. Stop trying to compare a empty box with fans running at hundreds of watts with a phone trying to save power every seconds it runs not to overheat and burn in flames - this is a lost battle and there's no way a mobile device will be at the same level as 2006 home gaming hardware anytime soon.
Wrong. The iPhone has tremendous graphical power, especially the iPhone 5. It will eclipse the XBOX 360 in performance very soon, if it hasn't already.
"Twice as powerful" does not mean much - performance in game is a combination of several factors and a matter of consistency of the architecture, OS, libraries and so on. I have yet to see anything on iPhone close to what the Xbox 360 is capable of. And I am laughing at the claim just like I am laughing at the claims that the PS Vita is just as powerful as the PS3, for example: it's fairly obvious that a game like Uncharted, available on both machines, is way less detailed and less fluid and less post-processed than the PS3 version. You can give the illusion it's "almost just as good" but once you factor all the elements mobile games are just relying on small screens to hide a number of visual imperfections that would be obvious and dirty on larger ones.
That's also why you see so many initiatives (like Ouya, Icontrolpad 1 & 2) aiming at bringing physical controls to tablets and phones.
Underpowered is a big deal. Before game makers were always pushing to do better looking, better working games and so on, and since we fall in the casual games bubble it has just become an endless flow of "meh" games not very enjoyable nor technically impressive. It is similar to what happened to the car businesses: it used to be a passion where most cars were built to reach top speeds and look cool and slowly became mass-market, fridge and washing machine like business with slow cars designed like shoe-boxes. It's just lame.
Getting traction is not the only thing that matters in life. Making a difference in an existing market is. You are more likely to make a difference on a desktop market with a great game than the same on the phone, just because it is so easy for everyone to publish crap on it. That's what the Introversion guys are doing and while they are on very limited resources they just strive to make better and better games for the desktop. They deserve more credit than they get.