Fortune.com writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt makes a good case that this scenario is NOT the future, at least not the immediate future.

Let’s back up. What is the table that Elmer-DeWitt is setting? The iPhone:Android=Mac:Windows similie is this: Google’s free, open-source Android phone platform will inevitably crush Apple’s brilliant iPhone platform like Windows crushed Mac in the 1990s, despite the Mac’s far superior interface/experience*.

So will it? Elmer-DeWitt says no, that there are two problems: carrier adoption of the massive changes needed to support Android, and the relatively small Android 3rd-party development community vs. Apple’s large, well-coordinated developer community.

The first roadblock is the carriers. As Roth reports, Google was already having trouble getting the mobile phone operators to play along. The country’s two biggest — Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T), with a combined market share of 54% — passed. “There wasn’t anything viable we were willing to entertain,” Verizon Wireless spokesperson Jeffrey Nelson told Roth. So Google went with the third and fourth best, T-Mobile (DT) and Sprint Nextel (S). Now the Journal reports that T-Mobile won’t have any Android phones ready before the fourth quarter and has been sucking up so much of Google’s time with its demands that Sprint won’t have anything this year at all. Ominously, China Mobile, the sleeping giant Google was counting on in the Far East, but which has also been in talks with Apple, has also pushed back its Android launch. Even more critical, if Google hopes to build a vibrant software platform, are the snarls developers are running into. As the Journal reports: “The Android software has yet to win broad support from large mobile-software developers. Some say it is difficult to develop programs while Google is making changes as it finishes its own software….. “Some developers say it is easier to work with Apple’s programming tools than Google’s because of the familiarity with the company’s Macintosh operating system. …

“Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google, says managing the software-development effort while giving its partners the opportunity to lobby for new features takes time. ‘This is where the pain happens,’ he says.” (link)

Apple, by contrast, has a waiting list of carriers around the world willing to sell the iPhone and thousands of programmers eager to write for the device; at its developers conference two weeks ago, Apple had to turn them away once the first 5,200 spots were filled.

* superior at least until 1995 when Windows 95 debuted, and the Mac OS started to get really slow, relatively, to PCs, due in no small part to Motorola’s inattention to the 040 RISC chip development