Design by simplification is hard. And surprisingly not intuitive. Look at a Picasso and realize it took hundreds of years of western art before something so "simple" could be appreciated.
It's made even harder because engineers and business managers often insist on extra functionality or visual clutter.
(Often there are good usability or marketing reasons for this, but too often it's simply the desire to be "part of the process".)
Now you do give up something with simplicity. In art you force the user to supply context and sometimes even interpretation; in software design this can actually be a plus. One of the things you give up in software, and hardware, design is novelty. When you boil a solution down to its essence there's often not room for differentiation. You have to change either the constraints, smaller batteries, for example, or change user expectations.
This makes competing against something so "undesigned" very difficult without trying to completely re-conceptualize a product.
This is what Apple did with the iPhone. Now it helped them in that the basic "smart phone" was so utterly, indescribably awful before they entered the market. I imagine the process Jobs went through involved looking at the current market and deciding that there was no way to fix any of that. So they started from scratch. A big deal was realizing that they weren't simply making a phone with some connectivity features and a bigger display, but they were designing a small, portable communication platform that needed to have absolutely minimal impact on, well, portability. They looked at the problem and built just enough to solve the basics and provide a minimal amount of hardware and software to support the ideas. Anything added needs to have minimal impact on the basics.
Now they didn't get it perfect, by any means. But they did a good, credible job. Good enough that if you are a competitor you are going to have a hard time solving the same problems, with the same constraints, and not come up with something that a layman would have a hard time distinguishing from the original.
Now I'm against software patents myself, and think hardware patents should be much more difficult to get and keep. But legal issues aside, if you want to compete against the iPhone and iPad, and not seem like an also-ran, you are going to have to come up with a different interaction paradigm. A device built into spectacles with a heads up display and vision tracking? Something totally audio based; Siri anyone? I can see the attraction to a phone with no display or buttons at all.
I don't know the solution(s) myself, this is not an area I'm interested in developing in.
But I'll probably want to own whatever the next "Steve Jobs" comes up with. A Samsung iPhone/iPad knockoff? Not so much...