pissed off apple enough

Well high end is necessarily required for what you listed, although it sure is nice to have one

Right now android is all about the Google Nexus, Samsung galaxy S3, and the HTC one X. Those are as high end as it gets. The galaxy nexus will be given all the latest updates and most apps use the Nexus as a cornerstone for testing, although hardware is a little behind. The S3 and the HTC One X are the latest high end phones, although in North America the majority of phone companies have a scaled down HTC One X.

But you can search yourself. I would recommend anything dual core clocked at 1.3ghz or above, 1500mhz battery minimum, and at least a gigabyte of RAM.

The go to place for rooted android is XDA forums. I would recommend going to each individual device forum there and seeing which ones have a lot of ROMs available (make sure they're running the latest too).

 

Rooting won't delete any files unless you do it in purpose or you do it wrong.

So basically rooting is not an issue in Android.

You have to decide what device you want, if I had the choice between low-end, mid-range and high-end devices I would go for a mid-range device and change it if I'm bored with it.

Here's a list of some mid-rande devices, the lisy includes :
* HTC One S
* Huawei Ascend P1
* LG Lucid
* HTC Vivid
* Sony Xperia P
* Samsung Galaxy Ace 2
* ZTE Mimosa X
Top mid-range Android smartphones of 2012

 

This.

The one x and s3 are the best phones on the market. The nexus is getting up there age wise but still makes the list for power root users.