On Siri & SpringBoard and the future of better mobile OS interfaces

We live in an age of relatively mature phone operating systems. iOS, Android, and Windows Phone are all fulfilling a baseline level of functionality for which the iPhone established the first working vision.  Today, while Android handset makers bolt on bells and whistles that start to go beyond the basics, Apple's proponents are vigorously defending the simplicity of the iPhone (e.g. Gruber, who is more right than wrong on this but still kind of wrong).  It's the perfect expression of what it's made to be, they contend, so what kind of iteration is there, really, to do?

There is oddly little desire for a better future here.  My utmost desire is a Siri that works perfectly in every situation.  To start to explain what I'm looking for, here are four queries that should work today. They don't, and Apple should be ashamed that they don't.

All right, I suppose that's fair.  There may be a security issue with installing without my providing my Apple ID.  Can you just find the app, Siri?

Really? You have an App Store, and presumably you'd like me to buy apps from it, but you can't even search it. Great.

Let's try to take some pictures now.  I have at least a few apps for doing that, so hopefully Siri can help me find a good one.

Very helpful, Siri. Instead, I'll just hunt through my 6 pages of apps and all the folders I have to find a decent photo app. I'm glad my time and every other user's time is so cheap! And it's a good thing Apple made so little profit on the sale of my phone, because otherwise I'd be kind of pissed they weren't working on this.

Ok, I guess I'll just send my friend, Esther, a message to see what she's up to.

I see. OS-level Facebook integration did us a lot of good.

Notice that I didn't give Siri really hard natural language problems here.  I stuck to simple constructs for things the iPhone should be quite good at.  And it really sucked at all of them.  To be fair, I'm cherry-picking, and Siri does do lots of good stuff.  I picked three simple things from my mind that I figured Siri would fail, and it did so.

Here is the future I crave: one interface to access any task that any app can do.  Maybe it isn't voice - maybe it's some kind of on-screen action flow or written natural language processing (a la Fantastical). But someday, I hope I can never again see SpringBoard.  It's not perfect, and it's not the height of simplicity.  It's just a thing that's pretty good and pretty useful that we'll discard once someone invents something better.