Over the weekend there has been a ton of analysis over the big billion dollar Apple patent win over Samsung. The contrarians have been saying that Samsung actually won this battle, and for good reason. This post by Enrique Gutierrez sums it up:

I’m writing this post after the FOURTH group of Starbucks patrons have made the connection that Samsung is now the same as Apple. They don’t know the details, they don’t really care, what they know is Apple is saying that Samsung is the same as Apple … and with one simple Google Search, you get prices that are basically half for what seems to be the same products – for nearly everything.
Right now Samsung, one of the largest (if not THE largest) manufacturers of Android devices, is being positioned as a direct competitor to Apple, for a reasonable sum of $1 billion. In other words, the plan to punish Samsung may end up back-firing for Apple. Do they want to want to risk a similar positioning of Google’s Android brand? A great quote from Eric Schmidt appears in a Forbes analysis on the ongoing lawsuits:> We have seen an explosion of Android devices entering the market and, because of our successes, competitors are responding with lawsuits as they cannot respond through innovations. ~Eric Schmidt, July 2011
Those are some fighting words! The only question now: will Apple take the bait?