Is this meant to be contradicting what I said?

It's all in the OS. There's absolutely no reason RAM can't be managed similarly effectively on a non-integrated product.

Android is just Linux with full attention paid to power saving measures. These OS can get very long battery life, but in my experience the typical experience is something or other keeps the processor active and halves your expected battery life.

My point is that it's not just the OS for Apple, because every part of the device is made by people with the same incentives. Android is slower and has worse battery efficiency than iOS not because Google are a bunch of idiots (quite the contrary) but because they have to support a wider range of hardware and work with the vendors who are going to use slower, less capable components to save $3 per device. Apple had a decade lead on basic things like storage security because when they decided to do that, the hardware team committed to putting high-quality encryption into the SoC and that meant that iOS could just assume that feature existed and was fast starting on the 3GS whereas Google had to spend years and years haranguing the actual phone manufacturers into implementing what was at the time seen as a costly optional feature.