If you root your phone, you'll have to manually flash the update for your phone (Which isn't difficult), and you'd probably be better off using a ROM. Cyanogenmod is probably the easiest and most well known, and is fairly stable with CM10.1 (4.2.1 Jelly Bean).
Hardware is the internals of the phone, not the casing.
Also, people complain about plastic, but when it comes down to it, plastic is probably one of the best materials for something that often gets dropped from 3-5 feet. It also doesn't interfere with radios or reception, which is common with iPhones and phones that use aluminum casing.
I use a bamboo case so I don't exactly lack for a nice looking device.
NFC is used for many things, and is quite common in Asia. It's slowly being adopted in the United States, and once it gains more traction it'll probably become popular. NFC is used for a lot of things, from the tap-to-share concept advertised by Samsung/Google, wireless charging, wireless streaming and a whole bunch of other uses that I'm too lazy to remember.
While specs currently aren't all that important currently, more innovative hardware will become a huge impact on mobile computing, just as it was for desktops and laptops in the past. Many of the phone manufacturers who create parts for mobile phones are also OEM's, or are partnered with OEM's. Samsung for example has a 8-core ARM chip, which is probably pointless at the moment, but will probably see wide adoption as it matures.
Android is also not just used for phones and tablets. The Ouya will be interesting to watch, as will many of the other products that are Android based.
Going back to the plastic comment a lot of Android OEM's make impressive form factors for their phones, some in plastic, aluminum or even wood (
http://www.justadzero.com/). There are waterproof phones (Like many in Japan or the Sony Xperia Z series), and even phones meant to survive being run over by a Hummer.
Apple is slightly behind in hardware now, but only recently caught up with the iPhone 5 and iPad 4. Previous versions were quiet behind their counterpart flagship devices in hardware. Apple does make better use of their hardware, because they only support a few select devices at a time, in comparison to Android that caters to a wide-array of devices with various internal hardware.
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