High power often comes with a price, and it's great when products are flexible enough to let you optimize for economy on those occasions when you need it or when the full power can't be exploited.
If manufacturers delayed their phones long enough to meet the functional ideals you want to see at a price you're willing to pay, you wouldn't buy them because they'd be obsolete and you'd go buy something else.
The Galaxy S II sold overseas literally has it all. Up to 21Mbps transfer speeds, gorgeous screen, most powerful smartphone CPU you can buy (watch videos or go test one in person if you know someone lucky enough to own one to see how liquid smooth and fast it is, even burdened with open apps), great battery life, AND a thinner form factor than an iPhone 4. The HSPA+ technology is extremely efficient and mature, to the point of near integration with the SoC. LTE needs to be there to compete. Plain and simple. Until you can balance good form factors and power requirements with all that speed, you are making THREE tradeoffs to get Verizon's LTE benefits.
1. Heat (even with single cores, Verizon's LTE phones are among the hottest, especially the first one - the Thunderbolt)
2. Size/weight - only the Charge is fairly lightweight, and you still have a thicker phone than the Fascinate while possessing EXACTLY the same processor power. Which is sad.
3. Battery life - this is the biggest drawback. Folks have to TURN OFF an essential selling point function of the device to get it to last a day with moderate to heavy use. SAD SAD SAD and just plain BASS ACKWARDS.
I would take an HSPA+ device with still triple to quadruple Verizon's best 3G speeds but that absolutely NAILS every single other smartphone aspect ANY DAY over an LTE device with YESTERDAY's CPU while still having below average battery life.
You shouldn't have to rob Timmy, Peter, and Bob to pay Paul. Maybe sacrificing one aspect to benefit another is understandable. You can't have everything, right?
But today's LTE phones on Verizon make you sacrifice WAY TOO MUCH just to have LTE. Sorry for the caps typing. Ok, I'm not sorry. I am yelling those things because I'm very upset about where Verizon is at right now, and pissed off to no end that I'm still stuck in a contract with them. The Sensation is a beautiful dual core NON pentile qHD device on a network that charges less than Verizon for very competitive speeds. That device really gets it all right, nearly as well as the SGSII. Even the EVO 3D is better than anything Verizon has by quite a margin. AT&T has the Atrix and the G2.
If this were an openly competitive market like many countries have over seas rather than a near duopoly that we have here, they would have to be more competitive. Verizon is simply not competitive anymore. They went crazy at first with the "Droid Does" campaign, and I thought that times were changing, but now their back to their old ways.
And competing networks have finally advanced to truly provide nationwide coverage. Yes, Verizon's is still the best, but not by anywhere near the advantage they used to have over the others.
This is not a rant do to a diluded sense of self-entitlement. It's more of a rant of the growing anti-competitive state the United States' cellular network is in. And this anti-competitive state is trying to get worse as quickly as possible.