It's pretty important to user satisfaction that Joe can say to Sally "You have an iPhone, right? Check out what they can do now!" And Sally be able to say "Mine does that too? Awesome!"

As opposed to Android, where Joe and Sally can barely help one another through the various UI skins half the time, let alone share enjoyment in cool new software features on devices purchased mere months apart.

(Sure, with iOS there are updates and features that don't get patched into older devices. But those situations are vanishingly few compared to Android.)

So, as an answer to the various times this question has been posed in this thread: Yes. It's a big deal to normal users that reasonably contemporary devices behave the same and generally have the same software features. And it's a very big deal for them to find out they bought the 'wrong' phone, not six months ago, because they got a model that will likely never get the cool new software feature their friend just showed them.

The degree to which updates don't matter, is the degree to which the users are barely interested in the device at all and use them as little more than a flip phone with better email and browser.

Which, while accurate for a certain population of users, hardly supports the relevance of any possible Android feature advantage.