Bill Gates was friends with Steve Jobs, got insider info on Apple's efforts, then started an "open" competitor to the Macintosh with Windows.
Steve Jobs inspires and educates his friends so profoundly that they become his enemies.
There is no proof that Eric Schmidt got insider information. Android had been in development for awhile and was only changed to be more of a touch screen after the iphone got released.
2. Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google at the time. It's obvious that his position on the board of Apple and foreknowledge of the iPhone gave him a huge advantage.
I hadn't seen even one of these before the iPhone (there were a few people who used them, but i would say their market share would be less than 1% in smartphones)
I think the rapid expansion of the smartphone market (led, in large part, by the iPhone) is tricking your eyes. Touch-screen smartphones were a significant part of the pre-iPhone smartphone market. But unless you were specifically paying attention to them, you wouldn't have seen that because the smartphone market was so much smaller back then.
Blackberry was never popular where I live, so I mainly saw touchscreen smartphones and Nokias (and I really hesitate to call the nokia symbian phones "smartphones")
HTC alone had over 15 models of touch-screen phones released before the original iPhone. I think that kind of blows away "your less than 1%" made up statistic.