Oh yeah, I should probably be clear that I personally don't think the icon is a big deal, for the reasons you stated.
I actually don't think anything about it is a big deal. Someone made an app that should have been an OS feature, Apple rejected it for using undocumented APIs, Apple builds the thing that should have been an OS feature, and Apple haters use this sequence of events as evidence that Apple is Evil.
It's basically the same thing as when people enabled multitasking on jailbroken iPhones and then Apple implemented it. Did they "steal" the idea of multitasking?
Copied from another HN comment, but if this is true it'd explain why there's so much furor about it on the boards:
> yardie 36 minutes ago | link
> From what I remember it used the published APIs which Apple then unpublished and rejected his app. This is why the story got so much traction in the first place. If it was another developer doing cool things with unpublished APIs it would have been sold through one of the other appstores and that would have been the end of it.
I actually don't think anything about it is a big deal. Someone made an app that should have been an OS feature, Apple rejected it for using undocumented APIs, Apple builds the thing that should have been an OS feature, and Apple haters use this sequence of events as evidence that Apple is Evil.
It's basically the same thing as when people enabled multitasking on jailbroken iPhones and then Apple implemented it. Did they "steal" the idea of multitasking?