As to Android, it is entirely possible that it went from being a Blackberry clone to instead being an iPaq clone. You know, the iPaq circa 2000 or even earlier. The one that was all screen. Sure it used a stylus, but that was courtesy of the limits of the resistive touchscreen technology.
I believe they're called HTC. They've built tons of phones that resemble an iPaq, plenty of them before the iPhone was launched.
Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc. The iPaq was a "PDA", however, which somehow differentiates it. I owned one. I know how they are similar.
>You keep inferring that everything presented in the original iPhone was an obvious extension of what we'd seen before, but it simply wasn't.
No, I'm not inferring that whatsoever. I am arguing whether its uniqueness is patentable. We've seen with various iterations of iOS that it is borrowing from its competitors as well. That's how the world works.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/12/a-visual-tour-of-androids...
Nobody is arguing that Apple invented every piece of technology that went into the iPhone, but it certainly wasn't the case that all their competitors were moving to multitouch based phones at the time.