Some perspective
Let's not go on and on about racism. Such fools exist anywhere. This is about trade discrimination and using the media to manipulate naive consumers who are arguably much more nationalistic than your average Belgian.
What might be helpful for people on this site who don't quite understand Samsung's influence in South Korea, where it accounts for roughly 20% of GDP and is overall the world's 35th largest economy, can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/technology/26samsung.html?pagewanted=all
For perspective, Samsung is a HUGE conglomerate, involved internationally in:
Electronics industries
Financial services
Chemical industries
Machinery and heavy industries
Engineering and construction
Retail and entertainment
Apparel and advertisement
Education and medical services
Trading and resource development
Food supplier and security services
Many, many smart people in Korea have voted with their wallets and purchased devices from Apple, Motorola, etc. and openly discuss Samsung's potentially harmful influence on future Korean development. They should speak up more often, because consumers in Korea lose; paying much higher prices for domestic goods here behind tariff barriers on imports, and essentially subsidizing their lower prices in export markets where the real sales volume exists.
Apple is a valuable company, for sure, but Samsung is, as I previously said, the core of a corporatist state, with gargantuan influence on laws, media, politics and especially international trade policy in Korea, which was once very poor and developed with an export-based mercantilist economic policy. In a sense Apple is actually punching above its weight class.
This lawsuit is an unfortunately nationalistic remnant of the days when purchasing foreign products was tantamount to treason. The people involved in it are suckers, and suckers exist everywhere. But Korea has been an extreme case, and if you'd like to see how, go back and read any story on this site about Korea. It's primarily backlash against Apple fueled by you know who.
Fake Apple stores in China? No problem in Korea, because there are NO real ones, only local "authorized resellers" who exist because of a Korean law stating any foreign business wishing to open a retail store in Korea must have a local partner with whom profits are split. Apple understandably took a pass on that nonsense while Japan and China boast the real deal.
For a more amusing tale, Google reports of the summer '08 protests in Seoul over the importation of "poisonous" U.S. beef. Now that was some truly xenophobic carnival!