It wouldn't have characterized it as bullying. They were defending their IP which they had spent a lot of time and effort developing... though a lot of the concepts they themselves had taken from Xerox PARC.
In retrospect, there was a ridiculously long gap between a GUI standard on the PC platform vs the rival platforms at the time. Part of that was the slow transition to 32-bit.
I believe Apple licensed tech from Xerox, but Xerox didn’t understand its worth. A bunch of ex-Xerox people later joined Apple (Larry Tesler, Alan Kay).
Plus if you look at old Smalltalk systems they are nothing like the GUI used in the Lisa or Macintosh. The concepts (mouse, bitmapped display, menus, object-orientation, networking) were Xerox's but the implementation (pull down menus, icons, drag and drop) were Apple's.
(object-orientation and networking were two things Steve Jobs later said he wished he had taken to Apple, so instead made sure he used them in NeXT - hence Objective-C and the BSD layer in NeXTStep and now macOS)
It was certainly a lot less refined, and you couldn't just sit down in front of an Alto and get to work using today's knowledge. However they were very close, the original Lisa and Mac OSs were essentially polish on the broader theme. That doesn't diminish the fact they actually brought it to the masses - however their work was undeniably derivative.
They went after HP, as well; at stake was whether anyone else in the world would be allowed to make a windowing GUI.
I find it fascinating that so much of the nerd world can never let go of hating Microsoft, but Apple, who have a far worse track record, get a free pass.
The "nerd world" of today is nothing like what it was.
Much of the "nerds" used to identify as geeks, to separate themselves from what is these days labeled as "neckbeards".
the influx of media/design people via web dev, and them bringing with them their Apple "religion", has altered the landscape.
Back when i first go interested in computers, never mind first got online, just about the only people owning a Mac were people deeply involved either with print media or music.
The twofold change was that web design/development branched off from print media, and OSX bringing an off the shelf unix.
