Backing up: I'm aware of the sides of the "how to spur innovation" argument. I'm asking if, in this set of proceedings, there was any impact OTHER than these two companies establishing that they will vigorously defend their claims AND I'm asking if those claims lie near any areas of interest.

For example, the "Dummie's Guide" trade dress cases about yellow or the one-click patent lived at the edges of those spheres, and thus helped define what the edge was. Was this a case that largely only impacts these two companies, or does the matter at hand fall into well-established realms and this was just a matter of legal details?

These are questions most journalism does a terrible job of covering, and hunting down legal blogs that also have enough technical knowledge AND aren't biased because patent attorneys tend to fall into the "everything must be protected no matter what" camp is quite an exercise.

I am unfamiliar with patent law, but the traditional discussion about it is whether it actually reflects these supposed values. Consider the major innovations of our time. Did patents play any role? As far as I can see, the best innovations spread quickly beyond the inventors (touch screens and gestures), and the remaining patentable details turned out to be either trivial details (eg icon placement on a home screen) or regulatory capture (see: codecs).

It just seems like patents were invented for an entirely different type of innovation than occurs now in software.

It's an extremely hard to thing to study, however, because the normal way to measure "innovation" is literally to count patents, making it extremely difficult to compare patents vs innovation.