Samsung was warned by Google and others NOT to copy Apple's patents and that's why they've paid a huge price.
I already know about that, but Apple has always had an aggressive policy about defending their patents. Samsung was clearly guilty in these latest court battles, this is bound to have an impact on their reputation as a company.
The management of Apple is very very clever... thanks to the Genius of Steve Jobs... what they do is re-engineer the newly discovered technology, while others try to be first in releasing the technology, Apple waits for it's maturity and then release it to the public with many customisations from their end and that's where Apple is being termed as innovative.
That's not how it is all the time, a good example is Apple's purchase of the Graphical User Interface from Xerox. After they bought it, they completely redesigned significant elements of it, & were the first ones to introduce an easy to use computer commercially with a GUI. The reason some features are included a bit late in iOS is because one source of Apple's innovation is their form of implementation. This becomes apparent by observing how applications developed by Apple happen to be a lot easier & enjoyable to use in comparison to comparable applications from the competition. I would say that Apple makes use of a variety of methods to innovate. Sometimes, they just happen to be first ones to come up with a great idea. For example; tablets existed in the past, but it wasn't until the iPad got released that consumers & competition actually started to take the tablet market seriously.
Microsoft has initially concentrated on Software development while ignoring the Hardware... and when they realised it, Steve had taken the world with a storm already leaving no room for Microsoft Hardware development to groom... what Apple did, they introduced their in-laboratory software optimised for their own Hardware... and that's one of the reason, Apple's software run smooth and flawlessly on their own built Hardware, and that can be judged by looking at the wast majority they provide in Software too. Ask any professional Graphics designer, Musicians etc they all prefer Macintosh for their jobs to be 'well' done.
I already know this too, in fact most good programmers develop software that aims to take maximum advantage of the hardware. Microsoft did concentrate more on the software development in the past, but they always took hardware compatibility seriously. When a company's operating system happens to run on the majority of the computers in the world, it's impossible to focus on a specific hardware to optimize performance on. That is why Microsoft relies on heavy cooperation with hardware vendors for driver support.
For Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has simply laid out some minimum hardware requirements for the operating system. The purpose of which is to prevent fragmentation, & fragmentation is exactly what happens to ruin the Android experience. There are obvious advantages of optimizing software for the hardware, but the main reason professionals happen to use Macs is because of the software available on OS X that caters to all kinds of users. Microsoft Windows still lacks many professional applications in spite of its popularity. The lack of professional applications is another reason Linux is unlikely to be adopted by the mainstream market.
The future belongs to Apple and Google, even though I'm not a fan of android but considering the market share they've taken and is about to release their own phones and tablets, they can be challenging to innovation of Apple... at the end of the day, it's the consumer who'll get loads of Goodies and that's what matters.
Competition is a good thing, & that is one of the reasons patent wars need to be avoided. Patents hinder competition to an extent. Companies shouldn't be allowed to get patents for every minor innovation, some elements of user interface design are too obvious. However, this does not mean that blatant copying should be encouraged either.
I never cared too much about Android in the past either, but Jellybean is a cool update to the operating system, & it solves many problems Android faced in the past. All that Google needs to control now is application quality & hardware requirements to prevent fragmentation.
