The one thing I was thinking about while looking at these was how badly one needed to be the alert view "pop" from iOS. Such an aesthetically pleasing effect that gets the UX metaphor across extremely well.
You mean besides the fact that you can't call your build of Android, Android without Google's permission? The fact that Google still hasn't released the sources to a 7-month-old "open source" OS? Yeah, Android is totally "open."
From what I glean from your comment, you equate Google's protection of it's name and the fact that one version of the OS hasn't been open-sourced to the iron-fisted grip of Apple and their control.
Control of branding is a stupid argument to base "is this free" on. Hell, even Debian, the freeest operating system ever, amicably forked firefox to iceweasel - the only difference being the name and artwork. Firefox is totally free for you to do anything with at all... except for the branding. It's to protect themselves from someone turning it into malware and distributing it under the official name. Branding is a stupid thing to claim as the be-all and end-all of whether something is 'free'.
Hell, even the BSD license that allows you to do anything with the code, sell it, free it up, throw it against the wall, even this extremely free licenses has branding requirements - Neither the name of the <organization> nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission..
And even then, Android does allow you to modify the logo. You can have the logo in a police uniform (see android police) or on a skateboard (see cyanogenmod). You just can't put a derogatory version on the android market. How very onerous - clearly those are stifling conditions for developers to work under!
Compare to Apple who won't even give permission to use the word 'free' with their products (as in, they won't help you if you run a competition to win a 'free' ipad).
As for "yeah, totally open" - it seems to me that there's a ton of people modding android code because they can, but on the Apple side of things, where is the opened source... at all?
Why have you set a much, much higher bar for openness for one product but not the other?
Except that those boil down to a couple of basic gestures: tap, pinch, swipe. The hardware buttons are irrelevant in this case. Oh, and swipe to delete? That's in the "manual" that comes with the device. It's smaller than a dollar, for god's sake.
