Android stole inertial scrolling. The app store. Multitouch user interface. Mobile Safari. The entire blueprint for Apples touch based interface design. They copied everything which MADE an iPhone an iPhone. The notification system, or whatever other "features" the Fandroids claim Apple stole from Android is not what made Android. The things that made Android were the same exact things as the iPhone. Mobile browser, multitouch interface, and apps. All the things that Apple designed.
All you need to do is look at Android in 2006, and Android today. Googles goal with Android back then was to use it on dumb phones and feature phones. To bring Google to every cell phone. That's what they would tell Jobs and Forstall, while behind their backs stealing the iPhone design.
The app store was present in Sidekick. Sidekick was made by Danger Inc. Danger Inc. was a company founded by Andy Rubin who then went on to found Android Inc. which was bought by Google and Andy Rubin now runs the Android show.
So one of the features that, according to your misinformed opinion, originated in iPhone, was actually done before by a company started by a guy who runs Android.
Then again, I doubt Danger Inc. was the first to come up with the idea of integrated application store. It's really a logical evolution of PalmGear, which operated since 1997 and was the biggest application store for Palm OS devices. It was a website but it's not such a great leap to integrate that directly into OS. It couldn't be done in 1997 because PDAs didn't have internet connection but finally the wireless technology caught up and Apple was the second company to do the obvious.
The same goes for multi touch. It has been done in other contexts before - Apple didn't invent the idea. The single touch UI was done years before on Palm devices. I'm not sure if Apple was the first to do multi-touch specifically on a phone but it was, again, an inevitable evolution of existing ideas. It just happened that Apple was designing the first gen of their product from scratch at the time when multi-touch screen technology was mature enough for mass market so they could bake it really well.
Mobile Safari? How is a web browser on a phone Apple's invention? Palm OS had decent browser a decade earlier. Safari is better but only because the hardware available to iPhones is orders of magnitude better than the hardware on those Palm devices.
But the real problem with such arguments is that you completely discount the tens of thousands of ideas that Apple had to "copy" (using your terminology) from earlier phones. Sure, they've added a few things of their own, but so did everyone else. The nature of technology business is that you take the best of what exists today, you add a few unique pieces and release an improvement version. It's myopic to complain that Google copied some ideas but completely ignore the Apple's massive copying of ideas that is iCloud (just to give one example).
Having an app store is not enough... Was it popular, on the same order of magnitude as is the iPhone App Store? Inventing is nice, but making it appealing so that everybody wants to use it, finds it useful, thats what makes an impact. But okay I am fine with App Store not being considered a big innovation.
But multi-touch, inertial scrolling, mobile safari (With ability to zoom in and out of text), pinching to zoom, the idea of not wasting any space for keys, changing orientation of screen based on actual orientation, proximity sensor, visual voicemail, no carrier crapware, etc etc etc including the app store -- made the iPhone a major leap in smartphones -- that vaulted the whole industry an order or two of magnitude above where they were at that time -- I feel.
Android took all of this from the iPhone. In fact, Android as a phone is very similar to iPhone -- except for minor usability tweaks, and more flexibility to customize. I definitely think Android is a derivative product of the iPhone.
Multitouch was inevitable and demonstrated long before the iPhone. Mobile browsers existed long before the iPhone. What the iPhone did was have enough juice to run a real browser correctly. They did a good job on mobile Safari, but this is not a mind boggling invention. App Stores? Are you kidding? I had app stores on my smart phones for years. Yeah they sucked, but Apple didn't invent it, they just made it better.
Inertial scrolling, yeah, that's a good call, and the only one you mentioned that's a legitimate invention.
I'm not so sure multi-touch was inevitable. I mean, as a general concept perhaps. But the trend for phone during the time that the iPhone was released was tiny-keyboards. It was the Blackberry era. It's no accident that 2006 era Android protoypes looked like Blackberrys. Jobs made a point that they were going to do away with that, and go full screen multitouch.
It wasn't obvious and there were a lot of skeptics about giving up a physical keyboard. Typing on a screen just hadn't been done sucessfully.
You say this is obvious now, but what phone did you own in early 2007? I had a Palm Treo.... with a keyboard.
I guess when I mean multitouch was inevitable, I meant as a technology and not necessarily on the phone. Yes, Apple did perfect that technology first, but I saw demos of multitouch on tablet-like devices years before the iPhone. There were no commercial products that I can recall, but they were working prototypes and not just demos.
Inertial scrolling has been in Windows since at least XP. It's the one feature of Windows that I miss in my linux desktop - middle-click to get the inertial scroller, then move your mouse appropriately to flick around as quickly or slowly as you like. It's very far from a new concept or innovation.
The App Store? Perhaps for payment, I don't know. But Debian has had a 'centralised online repository from which you can effortlessly get all the software you want' since 2001 (apt). It's what drew me to Debian in 2007.
Mobile browser? My cheaparse Ericsson non-smartphone from ~2004 had a mobile browser in it. The screen was just too small to be useful, and the uplink too slow. There were even webpages made specifically for mobile phones then, catering to the smaller screen size.
Apple is a talented design company, but they didn't 'invent everything good in tech'.
All you need to do is look at Android in 2006, and Android today. Googles goal with Android back then was to use it on dumb phones and feature phones. To bring Google to every cell phone. That's what they would tell Jobs and Forstall, while behind their backs stealing the iPhone design.