Most of the most visible features and improvements I've seen in iOS over the years were developed by the jailbreaking community and eventually apple incorporated into iOS.

Care to actually list that? I find that incredibly hard to believe. While there may be a list of 5-10 features that meet the criteria, seems like most OS releases have hundreds of improvements here & there.

All of Apple is just sitting around waiting for jail breakers to innovate for them, no one has any ideas about what to do with their time.

Don't even get me started on hardware! Incorporating all that stuff Samsung & Dell or whoever is doing.

Well Control Center came from SBSettings, for one. On a 3GS running iOS4, you could quick reply to texts, play background music, have a visual multitasking interface, etc.

This was years before iOS 7. Though most of the concepts seem to be taken from Android, which took most of the ideas from defunct WebOS. Well, mostly Apple and Google hired former Palm guys for their design teams.