[natch]

Obvious in retrospect. I had a friend who was a world expert in pen and touch interfaces and he had tablet computers from all over the place. None of them ever looked remotely like the iPad. They were all funky mishmashes that looked like they had been designed by committee whose main pool of ideas was based on hinges, swivels, styluses, and hideable keyboards. They were horrendous, but it wasn't obvious why until after I saw the iPad.

[marshray]

You can't patent this meta-idea of a "clean design". The idea of portable rectangular displays with pen and touch input since the old sci fi shows. Apple simply didn't invent this.

From what I read, the mere aggregation of existing things is not of itself considered patentable. It doesn't make sense to me that anyone would consider the removal of knobs or buttons to be worthy of patent protection. (But then again, almost nothing about the patent system makes sense to me.)