It's important to remember, there's no suggestion in any of these cases that anyone stole Apple's source code. There isn't even an allegation that they did any nontrivial reverse-engineering of an iPhone (it clearly wasn't necessary). Instead, at most, people saw a behavior and independently re-implemented it (and often might not have even seen the behavior first - many of these patents date far back before the iPhone - to the point where "infringing" implementations existed well before the iPhone), without studying the implementation at all.
That's like... getting a good grade because you wrote a paper on the Roman Empire and then accusing someone of cheating because they decided to write their own paper on the same subject (when they might not have even known the subject of your paper and even if they did it wasn't cheating).
No, what actually happened would be more like writing a brilliant paper on Roman Empire exploring it in a way that no one had before, and suddenly this guy who's been stuck for years suddenly "comes up with" a paper that appears to borrow heavily from yours.
Come on, yes the patent system needs reform but inventions do need to be protected/nurtured. Disregard the details here, and when I hear people having little rants it sounds like they advocate a kind of anarchist cookbook approach to innovation saying 'fuck it, you just make it better than them, who cares if the ting you worked on for 5 years was copied in 5 minutes by xyz, just make it better than them you litigious assholes'. Suppose I said this about your fucking homework? Hey, nice answers you put in there, I just copied them because they were obvious. Fuck you.
So yeah, you say swipe to unlock is obvious, tell me what the fuck you invented that was 'obvious'? Nope? Nothing huh? Nada? Oh well, guess that makes you an expert or something.