Apple by law must defend its patents or they will losing them.
You're thinking of trademarks and trade dress.
Patents do not need constant defending.
The problem with this strategy is that many of Motorola/Google/Samsung's patents are technical specifications that are now industry standards, and therefor suing the competition is monopolistic and illegal.
On the contrary, the whole point of putting them in a group of patents that forges a standard, is to let others make use of them.
It would be more monopolistic if they instead withheld them all for only their own use.
Lol.
Apple has been awarded 25,587 patent inventions. Steven P. Jobs is included in 323 of them.
I looked at the Jobs ones.
Over 85% of those patents are ornamental design patents (in much of the world they wouldn't even be called patents.) For example, along with a dozen other employees, he helped decide the look of the Mac Mini case.
Of the remaining 44 utility patents, his name is usually far down the list of contributors. (It is not required, but Apple seems to list names in order of who had the most input in almost all their patents.)
Of the handful that do have his name at or next to the top, they're pretty simple ones that anyone here could've come up with. An example would be using the iPhone's onscreen slider to agree to power off... pretty obvious since it was also used for the inital unlocking. Another is changing the shape of an icon while it's being dragged.
The major exception is of course the so-called "iPhone patent", which ceremonially lists Jobs at the very top, just above SVP Scott Forstall.
There was an article here on MacRumors just a few days ago, with a claim that 3GS and 4 were just 4% and 7% of the total iPhone sales.
That was during 4Q 2011, when the 4S came out. Before that, there were surveys saying that the 3GS was selling almost even with the 4.