When talking about Dieter Rams and Apple it's weird not to take apple's "stealing" into the discussion.

gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future

really great!
i came to it intuitively - i have a bookmark folder with great web designs which i called "Stuff for inspiration"

It's an interesting point. There is definitely a fine line between "copied exactly from" and "inspired by" in art and design.

The iphone analogy is hilarious. The joke of it is that this is an example of a great theft, where the "artist" made the work their own. So much so that the speaker doesn't know that the iphone design is an imitation of much earlier work by XDA (HTC). Saddly this failed attribution is rife across technological blogs as well as this video about design.

Next we'll be hearing about how tablet computers didn't exist until Apple introduced the iPad. The real success here, as with the artists that do manage to "own" a stolen idea, is that Apple have the means to popularise their theft so thoroughly through modern marketing that people believe it's claims of originality.