Who gives a shit who had the idea first, that means nothing if you cant capitalize on it. The tech highway is littered with carcasses of shitty companies like Palm and Sandisk and Creative who had a good idea and had no idea how to market it to the masses and dominate the market. Love them or not, you have to give Jobs credit for having an amazing team of visionary designers and engineers who can take someones poorly implemented idea and turn it into gold.
I dont care who first invented the hand-held mp3 player (I had a 128KB Creative RIO ), I care who makes the BEST one, and that happens to be Apple.
Apple frankly does not "suck at innovation", thats narrow minded myopic thinking. They have revolutionized industrial design with their products over the past 10 years, you have to be blind or willfully ignorant not to recognize it. Their "closed" business model is orthogonal to the discussion. The fact is they are one of the only truly successful AND innovative companies and their growing market share and market capitalization speaks directly to that fact.
You can hate the fact that their software and hardware isn't "open", but you cant deny they are well designed and often truly unique when compared to the other products on the market in terms of their physical design.