Granted, the American variants are with a dual-core Snapdragon S4, instead of quad-core Exynos, but benchmarks show that it is probably not that much of a tradeoff, since the S4 is on 28nm, not to mention the multimode radios integrated with it.
The 2GB of RAM was said to be added in the last minute by Samsung, as it wasn't exactly sure what will be unveiled with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and wanted to future proof its best and brightest to date. As it turned out, they shouldn't have worried, as Jelly Bean doesn't require anything more than ICS does, but we as consumers profited in the end.
