Apple didn't invent the "game" of holding back features for later models to help sell new devices and they aren't the only one who plays it. I'm fan of Apple's desktop OS, but not so much of iOS. I think much of the "love affair" with Apple stems from the fact that aside from their gift of showmanship and timing, they also make both the OS and the hardware and they are the only ones who build Apple products. That makes them hard not to notice. They are also very good at making iconic hardware with some really stunning industrial design. The Android world is more like a blur of dozens of different devices, most of which look just like one another and the only thing iconic about them is they keep getting bigger and thinner. There's never really any one model that is so stunning that it sucks all the air out of the room and forces you to notice it amongst all the others. The closest thing I've seen is the Galaxy Note, which stands out not because its a beautifully made piece of iconic hardware, but because its so silly big you can't miss it.
With Android you have this never ending procession of new devices with incremental improvements, so people's attention is spread out through all these different devices and there is no single unifying object that commands all the attention and can be an object of idol worship for a whole year while people breathlessly wait for the next one. The integrity of Android is also diluted by the multitudes of mediocre and truly ty cheap Android devices out there. Many people buy one of those first and get the impression that all of Android sucks as much as their bargain phone. I fell into that category myself for a while and walked away from Android for a couple of years in disgust, until I got a Nexus 7 about a month ago.
So to answer your question, I think the love affair with Apple will go on until Apple is dumb enough to really stop surprising and delighting people, which I think it beginning to happen already OR until another brand comes along that both does some remarkable things AND is at least as good, or better than Apple is at "playing the game". If there's a brand like that out there, I haven't seen it yet. It certainly isn't Samsung who's only advertising idea is to poke fun at the very people who's business they are trying to gain and who's only concept of innovation is to keep making the same plastiphone over and over again, just thinner and with a bigger screen every time. Throwing a stylus on one of them as a combo breaker isn't really as revolutionary as they would like you to believe it is.
As strange as it may sound to some of you, the brand who has the best (but still very slim) chance of stealing some of Apple's thunder, is Nokia. They are the only other phone manufacturer out there whose industrial design is worthy of mentioning in the same breath as Apple's. The N9/Lumia 9xx design is the only thing I've seen in recent memory that is close to as iconic as the iPhone, and its original too and does not look like an iPhone and it's OS doesn't look like iOS either. In fact, during the case with Samsung, Apple themselves pointed to the Lumia and Windows Phone as definitive proof that it was, in fact possible to make a smartphone and OS that look nothing like Apple's stuff...