The best place to be in business for profitability is to do that last 10-20% that produces a finished product, and Apple is great at that. The worst place is to do the first 50%, basic science which may enable great stuff in 20 or 40 years, but won't do much for your profits today. Hence why much of Silicon Valley is based around mining uncommercialized academic and research-lab work for raw material that can be turned, with additional work, into successful products. I don't think that means the raw material wasn't necessary or important (sometimes even key) to those products, though, so just looking at profits doesn't tell you the story.

--The 80/20 rule [Old saying]

Monetization does seem to be maximized at a bottleneck or stumbling block. Like bridge tolls. Or that final thing that makes the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. Apple does seem to do both.

So it's smarter (if you want to make a profit) to let someone else do that, e.g. someone who's paid as a researcher and isn't trying to turn a profit, and instead look for things that are 1-3 years out. You even see it within academia; applied math pays a lot more than pure math, for example, even though both are quite important to mathematical progress.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Log...

No one's saying that. All that is said is it's not entirely Apple's doing. In this case it was Synaptics.

For example, how different is the homescreen of the iPhone from this? http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI... Compared to that, Windows Phone with Metro is much more innovative.

Another problem is that many people attribute things to being invented by Apple because they first hear of it from Apple(and because they don't use non Apple products). For example, I remember when Apple introduced hybrid graphics with a way to switch between the integrated Intel gpu and a discrete Nvidia/ATI GPU. Sony had that working before Apple, but a LOT of folks thought it was Apple that innovated it. Perhaps Apple added more polish to it, but they certainly were wrong.

Polishing and going the last mile is very tough(see OEMs with half baked software and hardware) but does it deserve patent protection? Apple innovated and got awarded with becoming the most valuable company in the world with more than 100 billion dollars in the bank with which they can invest further in innovation instead of indulging in petty patent extortion over petty things like the bounceback effect or linking phone numbers in emails to the dialer.