The Apple consortium with Microsoft, RIM et al. can afford to go much higher up (have up to $100billion combined in cash. Intel+Google do have large deep pockets but how far could they take the cost up? Also wouldn't making it more expensive provided an added incentive to litigate or impose a licencing scheme to pay for the costs

At the end of the day, Google has to start to have a far more proactive approach protecting Android and Android related cases that essentially are forcing manufacturers to pay up for licences essentially for patent protection via Microsoft :/