Seems more to be about multitouch than Android itself considering the rant was following early 2010 HTC phones, which if my memory serves were among the first American Androids to have multitouch. After all, the G1 and Droid were out for a while before that. And there was a strange period where Android devices were capable of multitouch, but it wasn't enabled in American devices. All signs pointed to a sort of gentlemen's agreement between Google and Apple. I don't really buy into the Eric Schmidt as mole theory, but I can easily see two at one point close partners making a non-binding agreement that over time became untenable for Google.
I can see Jobs getting angry about that, especially since he always seemed very proud and protective ("and boy have we patented it!") of the iPhone's multitouch. It strikes me as more than a tad hypocritical, but the personal betrayal might explain the reaction.
Before the iPhone came out (and it's glass-slab form factor), the Android cellphone prototypes looked a lot like Blackberry clones. However after the iPhone was announced, Google apparently switched to the slab form factor with a twist and produced the G1 with HTC. In 2010, Google started making glass-slab phones with Google branding.
Whether or not that is "stealing" is another debate; however, it wasn't until the original iPhone arrived that the slab form factor became ubiquitous.
Every time I hear this charged leveled against HTC, of all companies, I want to shake people who have no sense of history. Go look up the O2 XDA, one of the first touch-screen smartphones. If you can't see the evolution of the touch-screen form-factor (and there are plenty of later examples), I don't know what to say.
Apple deserves tons of credit for making that form-factor much more elegant, but the idea that other companies are "stealing" by trying to come up with their own interpretations of that elegance, without acknowledging that Apple did the exact same thing, is just silly.
I can see Jobs getting angry about that, especially since he always seemed very proud and protective ("and boy have we patented it!") of the iPhone's multitouch. It strikes me as more than a tad hypocritical, but the personal betrayal might explain the reaction.