I don't think it's so much patent or copyright as iPhone sits on a huge stack of technology which is proprietary by contract as well. It's very, very vertically integrated.
New Android startups appear now and then. The sort of thing that's achievable with a few tens of millions of dollars of funding. But Android as a whole represents a huge pile of work .. sitting on top of Google Play Services and the App Store, as we can see by the relative non-success of Amazon Fire.
(I was actually involved in the development of a phone-like handset device that was built around phone SOMs from Sierra Wireless. The first minimum order for assembly was ten units, scaling to a thousand after alpha test.)
