LG Prada?

Don't get me wrong - the iPhone was ground breaking. It's the hundred little details that made it special.

But would someone else have done it? Yes. Is this relevant? No

Someone else would have made a phone with the same multitouch idea eventually.

But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.

You mean like the HTC Dream?

The LG Prada had a touch screen. But did it have A full HTML browser? A music/video store ecosystem? Would LG have been able to create an operating system on par with iOS? Within a year would they have had a development environment and a platform to create what became the App Store? Would they have been able to dictate to the carriers that they were going to upgrade their own OS and not be beholden to them?

None of those things were the subject of this patent suit.

The original statement that I was replying to was:

The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level.

The LG Prada being a touch screen and therefore would have evolved into the iPhone is as unrealistic as thinking whatever the knock off touch screen phone that Sprint released in late 2007 was going to evolve into an iPhone.

This assertion is valid only if you think that products "evolve" in the absence of demand-side market pressure.