Ah but then you admit, it's "the whole package" that is the real innovation, the individual pieces were really not that novel and a lot of them not even from Apple. Six months or a year later, as the technology became more available, most of these pieces would have crept in other smartphones. Apple didn't invent much except perhaps an internal process using exceptional attention do details and an execution speed that allowed them to iterate more and polish the final product better than their competitors.
They were more than well compensated for this since they dominated the high end smartphone market for 5 years and became the most valuable company ever. They do not, on top of this mountain-high pile of money, need nor deserve a progress halting, 20 year monopoly based on technology that would have appeared anyways on the market 6 months or a year later (albeit probably in a less polished way).
Proof that smartphone technology was getting cheap and the idea of making a smartphone with few buttons was the next obvious step in computing is that some guys in 2006 were even thinking about making it as an opensource project:
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cheap-hackable-Linux...
In fact, I remember thinking when the first iPhone was revealed that Apple seemed to have somewhat copied the openmoko project. I was glad that a company with large teams of engineers like Apple was having a go at this type of smartphone idea since I wanted an openmoko type phone and I wasn't sure a small team of volunteers would have enough resources to do a good job at it.