This kind of policing of UI bothers me for same reason patens on things like "One-Click Shopping" bother me. Many properties of the iPhone are things motivated design students would've independently arrived at. I know this because I was in design school a few years before the iPhone and we did come up with many of iPhone's interface choices during phone design exercises.

Samsung precisely copying the visual styling of the iPhone is a different matter. But policing supposed copying of basic UI design choices rubs me the wrong way.

For an earlier example, does anyone remember Google expressing actual outward praise (better yet, free marketing posing as ass-kissing) to Apple? http://i54.tinypic.com/rw6np3.jpg

Thanks for that ... triggered some nostalgia to see a screenshot of Google.com circa 2005. I kinda miss those little icons letting you choose which "engine" you wanted to use (i.e. web / images / maps / video / etc)

Google was probably more worried about the potential consequences of breaking the non-solicitation agreement than about Jobs. Breaking it would have meant Apple starting to hire Google engineers as well. And even if they didn't care about this then why start a fight over such a trivial thing?