Everyone copies, invents and speculates with similar stuff if they are in the same industry. Some invent while others popularize and vice versa.
TBH I feel Sony missed two boats they should have been on this gen (in terms of early and solidly) which were online and motion controls. They clearly had the tech for each but simply didn't push them enough particularly early on.
Sony started this gen (and remained so for a long part of it) focused on hardware only and expected others to take the hardware and run with it - effectively doing their job for them in regards to making the hardware useful and fun for customers.
That was their mistake and they paid for it. So far the one good thing I've heard from their management is Kaz admitting this and saying from now on they will focus on consumers and the finished offering.
That's what you need nowadays to get anywhere. Look at Kinect - MS have given it much more support than Sony have Move even though - I firmly believe - Move is more applicable tech for gaming in general and can be used in more genres than Kinect. Sony just dropped it on the market like any other peripheral with a few average titles and worked with their first party to get it supported in titles like KZ3 but otherwise they didn't really back it with a structured, long term campaign to promote it in the market.
Similarly they delivered the PS3 with inbuilt Wifi plus cable (which was actually more than the 360 had on-board initially and better Wifi too) then left it to developers to handle the online infrastructure in terms of chat, etc.
In short they keep delivering a third to a half of the full requirement and wait for the software developers to deliver the other half while Nintendo delivered fully working and supported motion controls out the gate and MS did the same for online.
I'm not surprised to find Sony has patents for this kind of thing, but I think they show how badly the company managed it's strategy in the market.
Also, given as I began that all companies in similar markets will tend to have similar research and patents (apart from the odd true burst of left field creativity) there's no need for everyone to shout "copied" every time things look similar because it's not that simple.
Try to be reasonable... its easier than you think...
