The simplest explanation is that Samsung has mostly shoddy engineers and designers.
The voice recognition thing is that they outsourced the voice recognition, so are just piping all conversation to them.
The gamepad thing is "oh we need a gamepad, the 360 is popular right"?
the benchmark thing is "our manager wants us to beat these specific benchmarks, let's just overclock for the benchmarks the manager mentioned"
I mean, it doesn't excuse them of course, but I imagine this is mainly a consequence of a lot of people whose job it is to meet their manager's checklist of features, and not caring about the products themselves.
The Alexa listens for a keyword (Alexa, or it can be changed to Amazon) locally, and then once triggered sends your query to Amazon for processing. That's the same way that "Hey Siri" and "OK Google" work.
Samsung seems to have skipped the 'trigger phrase' part and just sent EVERYTHING and tried to see if it needed to be listened to.
The voice recognition thing is that they outsourced the voice recognition, so are just piping all conversation to them.
The gamepad thing is "oh we need a gamepad, the 360 is popular right"?
the benchmark thing is "our manager wants us to beat these specific benchmarks, let's just overclock for the benchmarks the manager mentioned"
I mean, it doesn't excuse them of course, but I imagine this is mainly a consequence of a lot of people whose job it is to meet their manager's checklist of features, and not caring about the products themselves.