So... much... to... argue... with... there...
If you really want to argue who invented the smartphone market, it was Danger. Say all you want about Palm, but the Sidekick was the device that really proved the model for apps on mobile devices. I mean this in the sense of apps as opposed to applications, where you have over the air updates for the system. The market for smartphones would not be a tenth of what it is were that not the case. Had they not sold out to Microsoft, the smartphone world would be a very different place to day.
The OP does appear to understand what innovation is. Innovation !== features enhancements, however, which are often a natural product of ongoing R&D that make their way into a product. Apple using a retina display is a feature enhancement, Apple building one in the first place is innovation. As you said, this was Samsung.
In regards to the design of the iPad, Jonathan Ives did not have the original idea for it. There were prototype drawings from the 80s describing very similar devices. Just because Apple was able to make the push to actually build the thing and mass-market it does not really mean the company conceived of the device completely from scratch.
I mean, citing the iPad and iPhone as examples of innovation is all well and good, if we were talking about how innovative they were in 2007. It's 2012 now, where are the new products and ideas that are going to make the world more efficient and exciting than it was before? I know they have made bids to get involved in automobile manufacturing, televisions and other consumer electronics, and other verticals. Innovation in these areas would be magnificent to see.
Instead, there are no new products this year, and there is a lot of talk about reducing their line (there is still talk Mac Pros may be going away altogether in the next year or so). you look at Samsung, you see a company that is involved in every major area of consumer manufacturing. They have a strong defense business as well, and their semiconductor unit continues to keep creating new things all the time. Apple is a little too concerned about their stock price to try anything new anymore. I don't see them as capable of producing disruptive technology so long as the fundamentals of their business model discourage risk in their major product lines.
What we are seeing it not technology innovation, it's more like business model innovation.