No one is trying to rewrite history. We all know about the PDA style designs of the early 2000's. Thing is, Apple's designs were still nothing like anything people had seen. The picture in the post is actually proving my own point, not the OP's. That photo also illustrates how the same design concept can be made without blatant copying. All those phones and PDAs have the big-screen-couple-button design style but still look like entirely different models of devices. Even post-iPhone devices all look different while still retaining their heritage with the exception of the Samsung devices in question. It doesn't take an expert in technology, patents, phones, or any expert at all to see that after the iPhone debuted, a lot of Samsung phones started to look a lot more iPhone-like. Everything from the materials, to the colors, to the shape, and even custom changes to the Android UI all closely mimicked the iPhone. The idea was to get regular folks confused into either thinking they were buying the iPhone or make them think they were buying the equivalent of one. Now, regular folks often do think all smartphones look alike but when you walk into a phone store those same people can tell that those phones are made by different companies. They can at least differentiate between the lookalike phones to the point where they understand they're not all the exact same phone. What Samsung tried to do is blur the lines even further to the point where those normal folks who were looking for an iPhone could potentially get confused into thinking they were buying one because of the way they pretty much cloned the iPhone.
The patent system may be fucked but what Samsung was doing was wrong and patents were the best tool Apple could use to send a meaningful message and get them to stop. This case isn't all that good to argue the shortcomings of the patent system. There's too much biased information about it out there and everyone tends to just defend their camp. It turns into a Apple v. Android argument in the end. If you want to argue patents then argue patents. The fact is, Apple held patents, Samsung infringed, and justice was done. You can argue whether the patents should have been granted or not but you can't say Apple shouldnt have won because the patents should have never been granted. Too late. They already were.