Only a select population of geeks care about who did it first. The rest of the world just cares about who did it well and who brought it to major public attention.

Sure, lots of browsers had tabs before Firefox. None of these browsers were used by non-tech people.

It's one thing to have a good idea. It's a whole different thing to get everybody to use it.

In the same vain, you could have each attempt have some sort of increasingly intensive client side processing task. This could be used for charitable means (like protein folding or the likes). A user who makes 5 mistakes on their password wouldn't notice much of difference (but many users logging in would produce some good processing power) and a bot trying to dictionary attack would get so hung up on increasingly more intensive processing tasks that it would become useless.

Ok, sure, Eddie Van Halen (Jonathan Ive) is making all the music and providing the real artistic genius behind the band. But David Lee Roth (Steve Jobs) made everybody listen to it.

Don't discredit the value of man with a vision and a big mouth.