All this talk about how this hurts competition are either trolls or lack the necessary capacity for processing information and coming to logical conclusions about it.
Look at what Microsoft is doing. Now that's competition. Competition is coming up with your own ideas and running with it on the fair, open market. We'll see how well Metro does in the mobile space. I don't particularly like it, personally, but I respect Microsoft for the choices they made, and for doing their own thing. Apple won't be suing them. Apple has no grounds for suing them, under the law or under common sense.
What Samsung has been doing is not even close to competition. The copying was blatant. The copying was willful. We know this from Samsung's own internal documents. It was Samsung's goal to create cheap clones of Apple's products, rush them to market, and take advantage of Apple's efforts in R&D and marketing to coast along.
Competition is fair, the winner chosen strictly on the merits. Microsoft spent their own money on R&D, and they're spending their own money on advertising their products. That's fair, and if Windows 8 does well in the mobile space, they will have earned it. Samsung spent no money on R&D, copied Apple's hard work, and coasted along into the market on the wake of Apple's advertising. That's not fair at all, Samsung clearly has an advantage in cost-to-market. If Samsung does well, it's because they made their product cheaper through stealing designs from their competitor, resulting in lower carrier subsidies and greater push from those carriers in the stores accordingly.
Apple is a pretty confident company, I would wager. I believe them when they say they don't mind competition, because they believe that on a level playing field they can win. They just want everyone else to make their own stuff.
Consumers should want everyone else to make their own stuff too. That's how we get interesting new ideas like Microsoft has been working on (and, wow, who'd have thought anyone would be able to say that with a straight face?). If every product looks like an iPhone running iOS, what, exactly, is the advantage to the consumer? I can't think of any. This verdict isn't going to hurt the consumer one bit, it's just going to result in more companies doing their own thing and coming up with actual new ideas.
