Hardware has literal and metaphorical edges — it must be fully complete and largely bug free to ship. Software? It’s far more amorphous, like mist. Patches can be endlessly pushed. It never ends. Faulty hardware can destroy a company. Faulty software can be patched. The [Macbook] butterfly keyboard debacle may never be lived down.
– Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
It also follows that software can get better over time, although very often it gets worse. Gmail was a delight in its early years. It just got better and better every few months. Hardware, by its nature, always gets worse.
Finally, Good Hardware and Good Software are both memorable, years after you’ve stopped using them. I miss the Nokia E71 and the email client ProfiMail, at least eight years after I stopped using them in favour of an iPhone 4. If it weren’t for the failure of the underlying operating system to compete, they would both have lasted for years. (I still have both the phone and the email client; it’s just not practical anymore).