That's not unlikely, and it's not insane either. Processes are getting bigger, frameworks are taking more memory, and things take longer to fetch back in on app transfers. So if you want the apps to be snappy, you have to make sure they're in memory. Android devices have settled on clubbing the problem over the head with 2G of RAM (basically keeping stuff from being paged out to start with), while Apple went with 1G and has to play more subtle tricks.
Performance is about tradeoffs. The stuff measured in the article is response time of foreground apps. Getting the app into the foreground to begin with isn't free.
Android and iOS make no use of swap, they certainly will page things out that can be ejected (so not process heap, but mapped disk pages, including executable data segments, etc...). There is a little more involved with Android, and no doubt a lot of hackery under the hood in iOS, but both these OSes are running kernels with traditional VM systems and they work.
It's definitely not paging in the traditional, OS-level sense, but the standard Android (and, I think, iOS) behaviour of providing applications with a framework to restart exactly where they left off should be pretty much the same in theory. In practice, not so much.
Err, I see no way in which the activity life cycle is like paging.
In typical paging the application's memory is taken from RAM and placed onto a slower storage medium to free up RAM.
In the activity life cycle, Android is just telling the app "you're in RAM, but you're not running" or "you're going to get killed because I need the space, if you want to give me a bit of state information I'll hang on to it in RAM for you".
I don't see how the two are comparable at all, and I don't see how you could have paging without using a secondary storage.
I find some of the new transitions annoying, too, but it simply doesn't make any sense to say that they are "to hide choppy performance."
We know this because the transitions are very smoothly-rendered. Which takes processing power; the animations and such would not be smooth if there was a CPU issue they were trying to cover up.
It's an intentional decision. There's plenty of performance under the hood, or they wouldn't be able to afford the extra CPU cycles to draw fancy animations.
That being said, I hope they shorten some of these transitions, as well. In many ways, iOS 7 is faster and more responsive, and so it'd be nice if it were faster in this way, too.
Not really, the type of animations they're doing are very cheap and can be performed entirely on GPU, without using much memory bandwidth, I/O, or CPU time.
They are definitely way too long for someone to have seriously considered it a good idea on its own.
It drives me completely mental that I get a fade-in transition, just by turning on the lock screen of my iPad.