The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable. You can't use multitouch properly on resistive screens (or non-touchscreen devices). Apple pounced as soon as capacitive screens became viable - albeit extremely expensive at the time. The first iPhone was "ahead of its time" in the sense that the market wasn't really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone.

No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere).

Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air).

But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years.

Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".