He carefully said "without ever reading the patent" to avoid your counter-argument.
Consider: Knowing we could get a man to the moon and back pre-1960s vs. knowing we could implement "bounce scroll" on a cellphone.
The latter example everyone who is a programmer "knew" prior to the iPhone even if they never actually considered it... because the implementation of it is so amazingly obvious. It is nothing but a good idea, and good ideas aren't supposed to be patentable. Which isn't to say they don't get patented, but that's a side-effect of how fucked up the patent system has become in the past 2 decades, not representative of what patents are supposed to be.
I agree; not really relevant to the argument though.
Note that I am not arguing in favor of bouncy scroll patents.