You mean what people did when buying normal cellphones before touch screen phones? And so what? Sounds to me like Apple came along with iPhone and said to themselves "now we must change how the game works, and prevent others from making similar phones as they do now, so let's put a patent on rounded corners and go thermo-nuclear on anyone who dares "copy"."
Fast follow wasn't this blatant in the mobile space until the iPhone; there weren't any companies rushing out a near-exact replica of the Moto Q to profit off those sweet enterprise sales.
Look at this from Apple's perspective: they spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to create what was at the time a step change in mobile hardware, and then a bunch of other companies went "thanks for the 'inspiration'" and immediately began profiting from blatant copies of that original work. I'd be pissed, too.
I think you're struggling to come to grips with the fact that it's only natural that if someone makes something that works because it's obvious, then others will also make variations of that thing. That's what manufacturers are doing, from Samsung to LG to Sony, they all have touch screen mobile phones with icons and similar features.
It's childish for Apple to expect to have it all for themselves, then sue anyone who gets close to "rounded corners". Like if Ford sued anyone else for putting 4 wheels on a vehicle body. The Samsung phone is not a "clone", by any stretch. People saying this have swallowed the Apple rhetoric.
And lastly, the technology in the iPhone was only possible because of electronics and software that was in part developed not by Apple, but by others. Apple should give it a rest, enjoy their riches. And, they should NOT build an Apple store at Fed Square in Melbourne Australia, we don't want it.
I'm not struggling to grasp anything; as a person who makes stuff, I'm just empathizing with the iPhone's creators. I think we tend to forget what an "oh shit" moment the iPhone reveal really was - it seems obvious now but it was not at all obvious back then.
I feel the same sense of empathy for the companies Apple occasionally steals stuff from, especially Palm. So much of modern iOS (and Android, but Google hired Matthias...) is cribbed from webOS that it makes me a bit sad.
