Putting aside the IP issue, this sounds like a textbook example of worse-is-better[1]. Sun spent years trying to corral mobile vendors through a single standards process to ensure the "correct" result while Google shipped and iterated on something just good enough. Android may be a "dog's breakfast", but it's a couple of orders of magnitude more successful than Sun's Java-on-mobile efforts ever were.

Apple's mobile success might seem like a counter example with the iPhone as a "better-is-better" perfectly polished jewel, but when you look beneath the surface, the iOS implementation is filled with compromises and hacky tricks[2]. The magic comes from always compromising in favor of what really matters (simplicity, responsiveness), rather than refusing to compromise at all.

[1] http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

[2] I'm particularly fond of the way it maintains a recently rendered version of your application's interface to show you for the fraction of a second it takes to activate the app and bring it back to the foreground. It's only marginally more useful than a black screen, but works wonders for the perception of responsiveness.