A company that pursues very aggressive patent protection gives me the creeps. I love Apple products, I think they are well made; they work well with very few annoyances. Page turning, yea, it looks cool the first few times one uses it. But after a while…
Mature companies tend to spend fortunes to protect their intellectual properties. Great companies use their talent and spend the few extra dollars they have on innovation. Apple is maturing… but that is OK we all get older!

I thinks those patents are idiot, how is it even possible to patent such broad things? Luckily we (almost) don't have design patents anymore in Europe.

The think is the patent System is broken, it was/is a good idea but its way to easy to patent think that are not really creative or breakthroughs, thinks like Apples pageturn, everybody how develops an e reader app will come up with that idea.
Now Apple has a patent on it and other developers ( specially smaller ones that don't have the money to go to court against apple ) are maybe afraid of even implementing an animation like this and therefore its its harder for them to compete with apple.

But as far as i know design patents are easy to get and hard to win a case in court. So imagine an Startup being sued by apple over that patent. Apple has just to keep the lawsuit that long open as the startup runs out of money.

And BTW: Here is a podcast worth listening to thisamericanlife.org

You're right.