If Steve Jobs taught us anything, it's that the future belongs to the innovators. Whether HP deliberately "copied" anything isn't the issue; their design doesn't bring much innovation to the table.
"Similarities" are seldom accidental. Had HP's design been genuinely innovative, it would have been on the market long ago. It wasn't. The reason is pretty simple: HP still leads by the bottom line. Apple leads with passion that isn't managed by the board or otherwise forced to conform to economic constraints.
This is a very good point and deserves to be repeated. I've seen it firsthand.
Having worked briefly at a major company in the early stages of designing a new product to enter an existing market, I have to say the first thing that happened was everyone looked at what was out there already. We had endless meetings reviewing the competition deciding which features to copy and what the design would look like with a heavy focus on what was already done by other companies. The best from everything out there, while trying to avoid the worst. There was also a lot of issues with avoiding the patent minefield. There was
some brainstorming about innovative features/design, but mostly these ideas got rejected as they were shown off to upper management. Not because they were bad ideas, but because they would be more costly to add. Vice presidents like to play things safe and save money wherever possible.
I stopped working there before the product was finished, but saw it later and basically it was identical to what everyone else had done already in the market. This was unsurprising. It was a good product, nothing objectionable about it, but hardly revolutionary. That was just the attitude there, and I'm sure at most companies. You do what's cheapest and meets the bare minimum, with a heavy emphasis on letting a few other companies do the hard work first. When somebody else takes the risk, and it pays off, you follow, then use aggressive marketing to carve out some business for yourself in the homogenized market.
The saddest thing about it, was it used to be Bell Labs, decades earlier.
There's still good engineers and heuristics/ergonomics/usability designers at a lot of these companies, doing good work and trying to push technology and design forward. The problem is the culture and management focusing on next quarter's profits, instead of trying to do something new from the ground up that's harder to sell but has the potential for huge growth in the long term. Thankfully Apple's management has more vision.