Did you see the video I linked to? This was actually real and that video is dated 1 year before the iPhone was even announced, let alone released.
Besides, as far as I've read (and I haven't read the details of the patents themselves) they are patenting the concept of the pinch-to-zoom, not the actual implementation, otherwise Samsung would just have a slightly different technical implementation of it right...
You can't get utility patents for "concepts". They patented a specific way to do pinch-to-zoom on mobile devices with capacitive touch screens (and interacting with an event loop). Which is a similar, but not identical, problem to doing multitouch pinch-to-zoom on a projector-based system as in the demo.
Which is as silly as those patents which essentially took existing ideas and added "on the web" to the end of them. Not saying you're wrong, just what everyone else has been screaming - the patent system is broken!
Besides, as far as I've read (and I haven't read the details of the patents themselves) they are patenting the concept of the pinch-to-zoom, not the actual implementation, otherwise Samsung would just have a slightly different technical implementation of it right...