First, I am a little surprised at the number of people that laud this UX. The only time I have encountered it was in the Facebook for Android app and I found it not to be intuitive. Even once I understood the behavior, it is not always obvious what will happen when you drag down since there is no indication that you are at the top of the stream. You essentially have overloaded the pull-down action.

As to when this is patent worthy, I would argue no. Pull-down is as basic an action as you can do. The patent is equivalent to patenting the concept (as opposed to the engineering implementation) of selecting an item on a screen that a user points to with their hand. Or the concept of performing an action when you click on an item on your desktop (since clicking is as basic on a mouse as swiping is on a touch screen).

To be fair, it is difficult to argue where to draw the line for patents and some people would probably argue that my examples should be patentable (regardless of whether they are - I don't actually know). It just strikes me that rewarding people for these "innovations" does exactly nothing to increase people's effort to figure out a good UX for their product.