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Google's approach on the Nexus phones seems to be aimed at the middle range of the market and the processors/cameras/flash reflect that.

That's quite at odds with the choice of quad core Qualcomm S4-Pro processor, which is higher end than any other app processor used in a phone right now - anywhere. Given that it performs similarly to the dual core processors with previous generation graphics core, choosing the quad core for the Nexus 4 was clearly a waste.

Whether they did it as a marketing bullet, or whether they truly expected better performance that they didn't achieve, I'm not sure - but either way, the bottom line is that the fastest phone on the market right now on traditional compute tasks are the iPhone 5 (thanks to the A6), and the Motorola RAZR-i (thanks to Intel Medfield) - and unless Samsung can cram Exynos 5 into an oversized phone without too much throttling in the process, it's likely to stay that way for quite some time....