The ripping is evident when i comes to Windows.
MS hasn't been able to produce many innovative AND successful ideas (only Expedia comes to mind, and that was spun off)
There have been a few innovative ideas, but with no luck (like MS Bob).
The initial concept of Vista was to make it a great OS.
But MS cut most of that away, and delivered late.
It was supposed to have many features that were just thrown out the Window.
The most important was a disk format that would put any OSX or Unix to shame.
I don't think announcing Windows 7 is a problem, to be honest.
Afterall, it has all of those engineers that are expected to keep working.
In fact, I think its disgraceful for MS to churn out a new OS in 3 years (1 year since the launch, and another 2 years) providing they deliver on time, which is very unlike MS.
One would think this version is what Vista should have been.
Look at how many OSs Apple launched in between XP and Vista, and I wonder how many there will be by the time Win7 is out.
But so far, the only thing they have going is the multitouch thing, which is available on the iPhone AND the MacBook Air & Pro (on the trackpad). It is ALSO available on the MS Surface which is available TODAY as a frontend on Vista!!!
As for ripping off, I guess they all do it, but MS has definetly taken the lead there.
Dashboard is a rip off of Konfabulator (later to become Yahoo Widgets)
Context Menus are ripped from Windows, just like the CMD+tab.