A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

and people act like all Samsung did was copy. You realize they wouldn't be the most successful Android OEM if they didn't do their own innovation as well. And no, people aren't rushing out the buy Samsung phones because they look like iPhones (I mean they don't even have an Apple on the back, should be pretty obvious to anyone that it isn't an iPhone), they are buying them because they are cheaper and can do 90% of what an iPhone can do. Changing that to 88% (removing the two behavior patents) isn't going to make a dent in Samsungs ability to sell to the masses.

"the iPhone, as a whole package, without just singling out a feature here and there, was a real innovation, a breath of fresh air"

Ah but then you admit, it's "the whole package" that is the real innovation, the individual pieces were really not that novel and a lot of them not even from Apple. Six months or a year later, as the technology became more available, most of these pieces would have crept in other smartphones. Apple didn't invent much except perhaps an internal process using exceptional attention do details and an execution speed that allowed them to iterate more and polish the final product better than their competitors.

They were more than well compensated for this since they dominated the high end smartphone market for 5 years and became the most valuable company ever. They do not, on top of this mountain-high pile of money, need nor deserve a progress halting, 20 year monopoly based on technology that would have appeared anyways on the market 6 months or a year later (albeit probably in a less polished way).

Proof that smartphone technology was getting cheap and the idea of making a smartphone with few buttons was the next obvious step in computing is that some guys in 2006 were even thinking about making it as an opensource project:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cheap-hackable-Linux...

In fact, I remember thinking when the first iPhone was revealed that Apple seemed to have somewhat copied the openmoko project. I was glad that a company with large teams of engineers like Apple was having a go at this type of smartphone idea since I wanted an openmoko type phone and I wasn't sure a small team of volunteers would have enough resources to do a good job at it.

"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them."

Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years.

So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.

Also see openmoko (2006):

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cheap-hackable-Linux...

"The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card.

Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said.

The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open.

Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands.

The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection. [...]

Moss-Pultz adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...]

As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...]

He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "

Looks familiar?

I personally have always thought the iPhone was Apple taking the openmoko idea and running with it.

EDIT: added details

"Obvious" and "first" aren't identical, but they're not as separable as you're making them out to be. It's a stretch to say that a sliding door latch counts as prior art against a "slide to unlock" patent; that's essentially asserting that if there's any previous analogy to a claimed invention, the claim should be denied.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.)

A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.)

There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has.

If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.