Generally people say that in response to everyone accusing Apple of copying.
Remember "Redmond Start Your Copiers!" That was an official WWDC banner hung from the rafters by Apple, not some fanboys. Steve Jobs frequently gave interviews accusing rivals of copying, and then copying with the excuse "Good artists copy; great artists steal". All of those years of going on the offensive against everyone, has created a tendency of the other side to look for hypocrisy now.
There's something pretentious, and deeply hubristic and lacking in humility in Apple's marketing that I think has fanned the flames of these fanboy wars. In a way, their marketing reminds of the way Trump talks, only with a larger vocabulary. Replace "Great!", "Bigly!", "SAD!", with "Beautiful", "Amazing", "Breakthrough". It's just continuous repetitive of superlatives, even for minor features.
> "Good artists copy; great artists steal"
The point of this quotation is that "good artists" merely copy other people, which is what Apple is talking about when they hang banners like "Redmond Start Your Copiers", but "great artists" 'steal', which means they take the good idea and transform it to make it better. And this is very much how Apple works, and this comes back to your original pseudo-quotation, "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'". Apple doesn't just blindly copy what other people are doing. They 'steal' the ideas and turn them into something great before releasing them.
Apple doesn't blindly copy? What do you call Apple Music then? Ping? What did Apple do to innovate in that space above and beyond Spotify? That's a long list of UI features Apple cribbed from Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone that ended up (IMHO), inferior copies, where the copy didn't actually improve on (make great) the original.
In what way does Apple Photos improve on the quality of Google Photo's deep learning based categorization that is user-visible and noticeable?
Which is generally a response to itself being sued constantly over the iPod.
Apple tried to ban other companies from using GUI, claiming ownership of the concept. Of course, they themselves got the idea from Xerox, which got the idea from SRI/Englebart, which got the idea from Sketchpad (Ian Sutherland), which got the idea from Memex/Vannevar Bush all the way back from 1945. There's a continuous lineage of which Apple was a part of and clearly pushed the field further from military and corporate R&D to consumer, but did they deserve to own a monopoly on it?
