The bold sums it up. Honestly I (and probably nearly everyone else out there) don't care about that. Every company pretty much does that. The problem is with Apple fans and Apple themselves thinking Apple actually invented everything and deserve exclusive rights to everything. Look at all of these ridiculous lawsuits by Apple. And look at the people defending them without wasting a single breath. Check this forum out: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=146839&page=1.

Thats the thing! Apple thinks its the only  company that made something valuable and therefore nobody else can copy them, whatever that may be. Apple is hurting the industry. If everybody acted like Apple then there would be no competition and no alternatives. Would you like a life with only overpriced iDevices and not being able to choose?

At its best, Apple was probably the best company in the world at marketing "technology" to non-technical people. The marketing wasn't just limited to the advertisements that ran on television and it includes the physical design of the devices and the presentation of the company. The net result was existing ideas were presented to customers for the first time in a way that appealed to them, and they believed that Apple came up with those ideas.

While it may not be fair to give him all of the credit for this, I believe that Steve Jobs was the mastermind behind the brilliant marketing of Apple and (in my opinion) I already see signs that they are having difficulty managing this without him. The recent Mac Store geniuses commercials demonstrate this problem fairly clearly in my opinion. While Apple was heavily marketing their products as being exceptionally easy to use under Steve Jobs, the Mac Store geniuses commercials show users having difficulty accomplishing simple tasks which will (likely) be interpreted by viewers as meaning Apple products are difficult to use OR Apple users are morons. Another example of a change is how lawsuit crazy Apple has become; and I suspect that under Steve Jobs Apple would have been more interested in protecting their anti-corporate image than winning a lawsuit.

That thread has five obnoxious Android trolls to every Apple "supporter" (and some of those supporters are just pointing out the similarities to the iPhone and nothing more).

Awful example.

BTW, Apple didn't copy notifications from Android. Both Android and Apple copied it from WebOS.

Actually, I think Steve Jobs was the one that initiated the lawsuits. He wanted to vigorously defend Apple's patents.

I've never heard of WebOS, but different distros of Linux itself had similar notification systems. Android brought it as a pull-down to mobiles.

And name one "Android troll" from that thread. People there (myself included) were condemning Apple's actions, and trying to educate the Apple supporters that this behaviour is bad for innovation and unnaceptable.

No offense but you shouldn't be trying to "educate" anyone about mobile tech if you've never even heard of WebOS. They failed spectacularly less than 18 months ago. It was the direct descendent of PalmOS, purchased by HP and later sold off. They had an excellent notification system long before either Android or iOS developed anything worth a damn. You can claim that Apple has innovated little in the mobile space (which is a ridiculous statement to make) but if you're going to claim that, you also have to make the claim that by comparison, Android has not innovated at all. Early Android OSes were little more than iOS knock-offs. Since then it has matured into a fine operating system but Apple had a legitimate reason to be a little pissed at how blatantly Google was aping their designs. At least MS had the decency to develop a new, cleaner, and I'd argue better, user interface design. Active Tiles are a fantastic idea, I just wish MS would stop screwing up almost every aspect of their mobile strategy and become a legitimate competitor (I'm a current Android owner that will probably grudingly move back to iPhone because I just don't like the Android ecosystem much).

That thread is little more than a shouting match between Android and Apple apologists.

You are probably right, but that does seem odd being that a lot of Apple's success seems to come from people thining that they're not a big "mean" corporation.

Yep, Tim Cook has said multiple times that he's willing to settle some of these lawsuits and move on. Unfortunately, the ball has already started rolling and it's going to be hard to stop.

Does it matter that they haven't "invented anything"?

No.