Right, and those companies are full of shit, because Apple's UI is just an amalgamation of shiny icons and features that have been used countless times in count

Right, and those companies are full of shit, because Apple's UI is just an amalgamation of shiny icons and features that have been used countless times in countless places--in mobile, the web, standard oses, everywhere. Do they do a great job of packaging all these features together for a good user experience? Certainly. But 'good design' shouldn't be patentable. Same with Java. Name one feature of Java that hasn't been done 100 times in one form or another in some other language This is why software patents are absurd. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.