Are you saying that other people had been working on and creating what became Apple's mobile phone touchscreen interface, and they just bought the already near-finished product? If that's the case I wasn't aware.

Or if you're trying to correct me (I assume you're not, but you never know), I did acknowledge that Apple didn't invent the touch screen or touch screen phone, the tech has been around since the 1960's and even on phones since the early 90's iirc.

Lots of things like pinch-to-zoom, auto-switching the phone from portrait to landscape mode depending on how it was rotated, basically the actually-usable-as-a-browser features that are part of every modern touchscreen, were originally popularized by Apple. They were the first to make a touchscreen UI that rivaled a desktop computer instead of a pretty substandard WAP interface.