AFAIK Android has taken the "easy" way of not adapting the kernel to the actual hardware (like Nokia did with the N900), which of course means that the power consumption is much higher. Their solution is then to freeze apps (swap out, swap back, restart, etc.)

In the old days people complained that Windows didn't have real multitasking (it had "cooperative multitasking"). Now (other, but still) people claim that Android has real multitasking. But we claim that on mobile only Maemo has real multitasking.

As long as each group uses whatever definition they wish, then we cannot sensibly argue about this. FWIW and in my book: Android does not have multitasking.