I've touched on this in another HN post, but I'm a big Android fan/booster who dislikes Apple for a lot of their business practices. Having said that, I also think Samsung is actually somewhat toxic for the Android community in that anyone with a bit of common sense can see that they do, in fact, borrow a bit too much from Apple with their hardware designs and custom UI skin look.
This is bad for the wider Android ecosystem because it gives some truth to Apple's claims that "Android" rips off the iPhone/iPad even though IMO the core Android UI/UX stands on its own merits and in many ways bests the somewhat aging UX of the iPhone. What little soapbox Apple has to stand on is primarily due to Samsung being both unwilling to roll with standard Android UI and also lacking their own design talent capable of doing much other than badly copying Apple.
As a former iPhone 3G user who went Android with the Droid I thought for years that Apple was completely full of shit with their anti-Android stuff, but a few months ago I actually used a friend's Samsung Android phone for the first time and my opinion changed fairly drastically when I saw how blatantly it copied the iPhone 3G in terms of form factor and general look. This likeness went far beyond "Apple thinks they own the rectangle", but sadly because Samsung is so shameless, those claims actually end up having more weight than they should.