There is a paradox present with being authentic (if we equate authenticity with "coolness" in this context). Malcolm Gladwell addresses this paradox in his piece, "The Coolhunt".

"In this sense, the third rule of cool fits perfectly into the second: the second rule says that cool cannot be manufactured, only observed, and the third says that it can only be observed by those who are themselves cool. And, of course, the first rule says that it cannot accurately be observed at all, because the act of discovering cool causes cool to take flight, so if you add all three together they describe a closed loop, the hermeneutic circle of coolhunting, a phenomenon whereby not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot even be adequately described to them."

Authenticity is important, but equally important is finding those customers who can recognize it's "coolness" for its given domain, and will tell others about its greatness (hopefully before the product's "coolness" takes flight).

I understand the idea, that creating a clone isn't the way to go. But I think their is nothing wrong with trying to solve the same problem. With the ipod, Apple realized that like with the mobile phone, how it looks is much more important than how much space it has. I bought the first generation ipod. I remember a guy stopping me on a train station and wanting to try it out. We talked about it for a bit, he loved it, didn't care how much it cost. Unfortunately for him it didn't work with Windows. When Apple fixed that everything changed. The rest of the products on the market are just not good enough with respect to the ipod in terms of looks.