Honestly, I've never seen anyone use anything other than XCode for iOS. Android, it's true there is Eclipse and Android Studio, but Eclipse support for modern build system features like binary packaged Android libraries is lacking, so people are being forced off it. So there isn't much choice for either any more. Android does have a lot of devices and versions to test on, but iOS tends to have almost everyone on the latest version and just few screen sizes, so it isn't an issue. So I can see avoiding Android, but not iOS for this reason.
An extremely good argument. There are tasks for which all people involved developed a very specific development chain which has nothing to do with anything that existed before. I have not found a way to deal with that yet and decided to simply avoid it (e.g. having the choice between a $25 Python coding hour and a $50 iPhone coding hour I'd choose the Python task!)
But it's not really a problem, actually. Often these people who work in these environments don't understand what freedom of mind is anyway (like try to tell an Apple guy what a FOSS OS would do good for them). The need to implement the whole Unix philosophy and all it's tools didn't stop the Java world from avoiding Linux and BSD which already has the Unix philosophy and tools available. They wanted to develop everything themselves again (and sometimes did a brilliant job!) because that's how they are. I don't like that. I am lazy and don't want to develop what is actually already there and I am not so smart. All my tools would suck compared what already exists. So I am actually quite happy not to work in the Java world even though that's what I studied in university. When git came out I learned how to use it (so much that I would be able to write my own git now), although in school we always used SVN. Now I can happily merge, rebase and cherry-pick and can focus on coding because everybody uses git. Learning git even made my coding better because I learned some great things about software development there.
(This now became more of a novel than a response to your text. Sorry!)
If you are running the same application on equivalent hardware at the same API level then you should be fine.
Android has issues with hardware as well as the various API versions. The closest parallel in Java would be comparing a Pentium 4 running Java 1.3 vs some 12 core server running Java 1.7 or something.
Equivalent hardware in the Android universe is the Nexus 5 (plain Android UI), Samsung S5 (using Samsung's UI customization, TouchWiz), HTC One M8 (Sense UI), and Moto X (almost plain Android UI, but not quite).
So a closer parallel would be that 12 core server running Java 1.7 can have its UI skinned by different device manufacturers, and that the UI actually makes a great deal for acceptance of the app in the marketplace.
