You're conflating design with the marketing and support that convinces people to open themselves to learning a new system design.
Linux copied the Windows interaction paradigm (and everything else too - fvwm95/afterstep/olvwm/cde/etc) because the goal wasn't to create a new method of interaction and suffer from two adoption battles, but to appease people complaining about how Linux wasn't intuitive (after they'd already gone through one UI learning curve). Ubuntu will never ship with a default tiling window manager (certainly not the "best" design, but it's a novel design).
> based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way.
If a user desires for their operating environment to function in some way, they should be able to develop that customization, full stop. I use 24 virtual desktops with windows generally maximized, switching between them with [Alt+]F1-F12. Is this good design, especially for the average user? Hell no. But it fits my desires and is quick enough that I can't understand why people desire multiple monitors. The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable, and only serves to illustrate the bounds of the field.
> This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them.
Sigh, back to this again? Nope, what's being rejected is the idea that engineering an implementation of a concept should get you the rights to the entire concept through a "concept plus computer" patent. Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input? Instead, we get descriptions of straightforward processes in terms of vague programming idioms.