I've owned various iPhones (starting with the 4 in 2010) and I'm going to take a serious look at the Pixel 3 in 2018.
Performance is a feature, and I don't see a compelling reason why I should upgrade my 6S. I have a suspicion that Apple will keep the '6' chassis they've stuck with since the release of the 6 (6/6S/7/8) at 2GB of memory, and will continue to do so with the 9 next year. Pixel 2 performance with 4GB of memory is impressive. And I will not pay $1000 for a phone, that's absurd.
Features I focus on when evaluating a phone - how quickly does the device unlock? Does it have a fingerprint reader? How quickly can I open the camera app? How are the photos? (I really hope Android device makers diverge from Apple and pursue a under the front glass fingerprint reader instead of facial recognition). I could care less about AI assistants/animojis. Get the basics down.
Google _still_ has significant QA issues nearly six years after designing their first phone (Nexus 4) for OEM manufacturing.
RCS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services) still needs to get off the ground. Until then, iMessage will still rule. My family is familiar with the built in messaging app, and I'm not asking my parents to use a separate app for texting. RCS will be able to replace iMessage for us.
Apple is a $875 billion dollar company because they figured out how to do customer service/QA/hardware and designed an easy to use OS.
I'm not asking Google to focus on ease of use for the OS, just get QA/service/hardware correct, at a $650 price point.