What adverts are you speaking of? I don't recall seeing an HTC phone that blatantly ripped off the iPhone's design (and actually HTC had been doing touch based phones since before Apple, see the HTC’s Touch P3450 for an example).
The particular ones I remember were Bus shelter ads in the UK about a year ago. I think I might have made a mistake and be thinking of ads for a Samsung phone. From a distance, with the specific app grid layout and general colour distribution in the image they looked a lot like iPhones. See the image in this article:
http://mynokiablog.com/2011/04/19/itc-staff-recommends-sidin...
PS I haven't read the article, just found the image on google image search.