IMO adapting people's good ideas so that it becomes sufficiently different from the original, hopefully in a better & advantageous way is genuine innovation. Of course this is very subjective as this whole thread has shown.
In my view, the initial galaxy phones slavishly copied not just the physical form (not just in terms of shape, all the way down to the minimalist styling of the front - the silver rim, the single physical button, the black bezels on the top & bottom of the screen), but software interface as well (the similarly designed squarish icons with rounded corners - some even with nearly identical symbols & colour scheme, the way they arrayed the icons on the home screen etc). You would notice that Apple's exhibits also showed how other handphone manufacturers that designed their software differently & that only the Samsung "designs" could be plausibly mistaken for Apple's.
Apple is not beyond copying other people, but I would like to think that at least they properly compensate the original innovators for their effort in R&D - note the previous examples cited abt the Mac OS & Xerox. Even the previous gen iPhone 4s flagship feature - Siri - was bought from another smaller independent developer.
