Re: When you swim with sharks...
For an example of semi-modern Apple doing exactly this look up Sherlock 3 versus Watson; Watson was a commercial third-party internet search tool somewhere around 2002 that brought a large variety of different vendors' search functionalities together in a light, clean box without any of the web's presentational baggage. Apple gave it a design award and then shipped the suspiciously-similar Sherlock 3 in the next version of OS X — Sherlocks 1 and 2 had been purely local search; they're Spotlight predecessors.
There was no court case partly because the authors of Watson seem to be quite mature about this sort of thing, and probably because the Sun swooped in and bought the original anyway. Then did nothing with it, naturally, but I'm sure the cheque helped.
