I'd say 50% of my friends have an Iphone and virtually everyone at my office has one; the Frau and my brother both have iPhones. No one I know has had a single issue as far as I'm aware. My phone has only been turned off about three times since I got it which was well over a year ago and it has survived intense sunshine, -20 degrees and it has been pushed technologically as far as a phone can go. It is still fine. And I'm not really sure what you mean by updating. I get the odd IOS update and App updates.......but these are periodic and hardly a hinderance-I choose a suitable moment every so often to update them. I have a feeling your post is based more on prejudice than fact.
I've lost count how many times my girlfriend has had to re-boot both her old iPhone 4 and her new iPhone 5. As for the ridiculous palaver of moving all her stuff from her old phone to her new, using a mixture of phone backup and iPants to move data ( oh and trying to move the local storage point in iTunes to a new drive ) and attempting to manage two iPhones that are used in the house with one PC nearly drove me to drink !!!! I took me nearly two days to get her new iPhone working like the old one - it takes me 30 minutes to do exactly the same thing when I upgrade my Android phone.
As for adding extra storage to an iPhone