And now my two cents.
(1) Personal note -- bought the Droid 3 about a month before they announced the Droid 4. There's no therapist on the planet who can undo the damage from that episode in my life -- I'll be burned and bitter til the day I die, so i totally get where you're coming from.
(2) My crystal ball (I try to read Android/tech news daily) tells me that Samsung's reboot of the S4 will be very similar to the HTC One, e.g., metal unibody and very, very sexy. I personally think it will be the kind of phone that will make S4 owners wish they waited (
please see minirant in the postscript below), BUT (and it's a HUGE BUT) I wouldn't expect it to be announced until Q1 2014, and released end of the same quarter. So I'd say the coast is clear on the S4 for the time-being. (
Remember, all that was speculation.)
(3) Verizon is getting the HTC One sometime "soon", but given that Sprint and AT&T have had it for a few months now, if you picked it up in August or September, you (and/or your wife) would instantly have a little, nagging voice in your head that something better was around the corner (
read minirant below if you haven't already). Again, my sense (hah, I made a pun) is that HTC won't be releasing anything in the class of the One until early next year, and when they do, my gut feeling on that is that it will be like the jump from S3 -> S4, that is, incremental. I don't think you'll really have any regrets.
(4) There is a lot of buzz coming now from Motorola, but anyone who reads my posts here knows I ALWAYS play the "emperor's new clothes" card which means I...just...don't...get it. I do not think that either the new Droid or the X lines will be noteworthy. Both campaigns will die about a week after launch. (Though, admittedly, the hype coming from the Googorola machine right now over the software capabilities of the X, e.g., "situational awareness" and "dedicated-chip power management" sound promising. But if the launch is sometime this fall, we should be seeing "blow your mind" trade show demos right now, and the fact that we're not means the technology simply doesn't exist -- I really think it's all talk and marketing hype.)
Personally, no other phones are on my radar. I would have LOVED a Nexus 5 (the mythical replacement to the Nexus 4), but remember the 4 never came with a CDMA radio, meaning no Verizon version. And for now the N5 is vaporware anyway.
tl;dr Both the S4 and the One look like wonderful phones, with way more than enough horsepower and battery life (though only the S4 has a removable battery). Great cameras, great screens, great phones. And if you don't mind seeing better phones in about 6 months, you'd be a happy owner of either.
-Matt
PS Minirant: I've babbled for pages and pages elsewhere on this forum about the cell-phone production/marketing loop, and how each of us has been sucked into basically an addictive cycle of (1) comparison shopping like a madman for weeks, (2) FINALLY settling on the phone of our dreams, (3) living happily-ever-after for about a month, and then (4) spending the next ~12 months nail-biting and wondering "should I have waited???" So my own personal mantra is "we all have those feelings" and "there's no point in reminding someone else who's in the shopping stage that 'if you wait for the next best thing you'll never buy a phone.'" The lure of shiny plastic and metal and glass and technology is powerful drugs and no amount of common sense or rational thinking can overcome it.
She will love the features, the camera and the display. Thats my two-cents! Also, I have an S4. Best phone on earth, and will be a long living device.