I have yet to see my Xperia ZL have less than 800MB of free an extra 2GB would be a total waste. And you simply stated you'd rather have a dual than a quad, peak frequency means very little except for potential processing power. Just because your CPU is capable of a higher clock speed doesn't mean it will idle any higher. Likewise the only difference between a quad with a single utilized core and a dual with a single utilized core is the minute amount if extra leakage current for the quad.
I think you meant to say that higher frequencies may need more voltage, amperage has very little to do with CPU frequency scaling.
And obviously the memory overhead for a virtualized process i.e. Dalvik VM is not even in the same league as a system VM.
Buddy that 800mb is without running any foreground applications other than either Settings app or the homescreen. Like I said try running some monitoring apps on the background and try using the browser then maybe try loading some sites with lots of javascript codes in it.
Or if you like try launching 4 types of angry birds and the 2 temple run games simultaneously without killing one of them and let's see if OOM doesn't kick in and kill any of them.
Regarding CPU cores please state something that requires a quad core processor. The smoothness of the UI your experiencing is because of the type of processor your phone is using "The Snapdragon S4 Pro" even if you disable all the extra cores in it you won't feel anything different unless of course you'll run some benchmark tools or video decoding stuffs in there.
And just FYI more cores doesn't mean greater processing power. It's more cores = more processes it can handle.
And on the CPU freq clocks who said t that amperes doesn't increase on each frequency table? Please take a look at qualcomm's document on their site regarding it's processors so you would know how they calculate it. Voltage is just used to provide more electricity to power up the processor but voltage alone won't make a processor active.
