As a Windows phone refugee living in Androidland (seriously MS, was it so hard to make a worthy successor for the 930 along with not completely abandoning the rest of the range?) live tiles is the feature I miss the most :(
Only a minority of the apps have them (and even fewer of those are remotely good/configurable), absolutely no consistency in the design between widgets and how they're a mix of background and icon. WP just had fantastic design patterns all around.
That's my problem with widgets too, coming from someone who loved his Lumia 920. Widgets are ugly. Like seriously ugly. And why do some of them take up 4x4 and others only let me pick 1x4 or 2x4, and some are other stupid sizes... all I want is 2x2 tiles that match the theme of my phone.
What's the point in getting a really nice theme and then ruining it with AccuWeather's horrible widget and a calendar that looks like an HTML iframe?
BTW, thanks for the tip on the iMessage timestamps, their "seeming" absence was an obnoxious nitpick when I switched to an iPhone.