Nilay Patel writing at The Verge
But it's clear that the current state of Android patent litigation is having a much deeper effect on the products in the market than just Samsung's minor redesign of the Galaxy Tab 10.1N's shell — it's changing how Android actually looks and feels for the end user.
I understand the complaints about software patents and the litigation around them but in this case they are actually causing companies to create new ideas rather than copy existing ones. This also isn't just another pro Apple comment either because it goes both ways. Apple directly copied Androids notification tray with the notification center because it was better. If Google or an Android OEM had patented that implementation Apple would have been forced to come up with a different way to display notification center. Who knows, but maybe if they had been forced they could have designed something even better.
Scarcity breeds innovation and no one is going to blow the lid off of the mobile industry in the future like Apple did in 2007 by copying Apple's ideas.