What's so special about Android?

Android is similar to the iPhone but only to the way they both have apps, you see it's more of an alternative to the iPhone due to it being more customizable to the user experience and the different form factors. Android offers options pretty much, some nice things though are social networking integration, great web surfing capabilities, and widgets. Widgets are good because they offer you the information on the home screen without opening the the application itself, an example is a clock widget with weather and a twitter widget with scrolling updates of the latest tweets.

About customization, some manufacturers offer a custom UI (user interface) over the basic Android Layout. Some are very good they offer heavy integration with their software as well as look great, what i mean by heavy integration is like scrolling widgets which requires a special SDK which only works with their UI. If you don't like the UI that comes with the device you can always download an application to replace it, known as home replacements that offer lots of customization some offer a lot of themes and like I said software integration, say theirs a feature on another Android phone you want some home replacements mimic said feature/appearance.

Again Android offers options you can replace a lot of things that you don't like or would prefer over the default, I myself replaced my lockscreen :)

Hope this helped.

As compared to what? It's just another operating system. I'd say that the order of bests go iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows.

Android is neat because of its massive app market. However, anyone can throw an app into the market so some are unstable and can do bad things to your phone. iPhone has a somewhat similar issue. Blackberry is the safest.

If you were to get an Android I'd go with the new Samsung Galaxy S series (They are putting a model on all 4 carriers) or an HTC.