While true in a strictly short term sense, not being "nice" is the sort of thing that erodes your brand image. One too many of these sorts of stories stick in a consumers head to create a generally negative image, which can be extremely hard to reverse (see Scoda).
And for a luxury company like Apple, brand image is everything.
First, you're conveniently omitting the part where Google apologized and fired the people involved: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/30/google-moca...
Second, as for Eric Schmidt not disclosing his conflict-of-interest, it's not like the Android acquisition (and its relationship to Google's mobile ambitions) was some deep, dark secret (like the iPhone was): http://www.webcitation.org/5wk7sIvVb
And that was public over a year before Eric Schmidt joined the Apple board: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric...
It seems to me that if anyone had the responsibility of keeping Schmidt off of the Apple board because of a conflict-of-interest between Android and the iPhone, it was Apple.
For the moment, the fun stuff is coming from the Android ecosystem, and Apple is getting in the way of people getting it. Hence the wrath of the crowd who adore new things, the ones that Apple used to care about, before they crossed the chasm and jumped the shark.
Nevertheless, "Apple is getting in the way of us getting neat things" seems a more plausible source of the anger expressed than, than to believe that people have deeply held views about IP laws as they apply to this particular case, or that they have strong opinions about Apple's business practices generally (the spark point is a ban preventing consumers from buying a product, not, say labor practices in China)
If Apple were to announce a bright shiny new iPhone that was seen as innovative, and people were still angry and wanted to #BoycottApple, then this subjective hypothesis will be proven incorrect.
That is because the perception is that they're using it to countersue Microsoft and Apple who filed the first volleys.
>Apple are playing the same legal game as Google are.
No, Apple was the initial aggressor against HTC, Motorola and Samsung.
And that matters a lot. Have you seen the PC OEMs sue each other over patents like this? They seem to compete in the marketplace like most other industries.
As long as companies keep building up arsenals of shit patents that they can use to justify these preliminary injunctions, or shop jurisdictions, the beatings will continue and make it virtually impossible for new players to enter the market for fear of legal morass.
The issue in the Apple cases that makes me so angry is that they're treating the US patent system like the Japanese 'product design' patents, only impossibly broader and less specific.
This type of nonsense - both from non-practicing trolls and the hegemony of practicing patent trolls - has a real cost. Congress needs to step in and limit the scope on a broad swath of patents, make it harder to get injunctions on this stuff, and generally find ways to penalize anticompetitive behavior.
Samsung own the South Korean government, and they've been putting up obstacles to foreign phones in South Korea for years, even before the iPhone.