This is blatantly false. Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
Not only, as has already been pointed out, did the UI change, but if you look at the Android architecture it's clearly evolved along an very different path to iOS.
I remember when the first Android SDK came out the programming manual made it very clear to developers that we weren't to expect devices to always have discrete GPUs or touch-screens.
All those videos of Android demo or prototype units clearly showed Android was a Blackberry clone (just look at that tiny touchpad for navigating around Android OS) and changed its design direction after iPhone made its appearance.
If you want to show off what Android can do, you put it on all kinds of devices that people are using at the moment. If everyone has a Blackberry, you want to show that you can make a software for Blackberrys based on Android. If everyone is hyped on digital cameras, you show a software and ui for such a camera.
Android used to have 3 prototypes in its early stages: a blackberry type, a tablet-type device, and the device that later became the Tmobile G1, the first android phone. The platform never changed course, and it clearly never was a Blackberry clone.
I'm not so sure about that. Blackberry didn't do that, and neither did Apple...
The iPhone certainly was in development some time prior to its announcement.
Public iPhone announcement was January 9th 2007: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-th...
Even with a conspiracy angle, a three month head start isn't much.
At the time, Windows Mobile was the epitome of a modern mobile OS. It had a real(ish) browser and a VM-based app runtime for a modern (C#) language (albeit optional and not nearly as tightly integrated with OS middleware as in Android). Google saw that an ecosystem such as Windows Live is much more critical to a mobile device than it is to a desktop PC. The nature of Android more closely reflects the threat from Microsoft than from iPhone.