Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?
If it were so obvious, why wasn't it done previously? I mean the hardware has been able to support the functionality for yonks.
No, the functionality hasn't been around for yonks. It depends on the new, faster, screens with more responsive, capacitative, touch technology that only became widely available about in time for the iPhone.
Look at pre-iPhone touch-screen devices that had the older resistive type of touch screen -- like the Palm PDAs and Treo phones, or the Nokia N97 smartphone -- and you'll see that they scrolled with a scrollbar or by pressing up/down keys so the notion of bounce isn't relevant.
Once you bring faster and more sensitive screens into the equation different things become obvious. Bounce is one of those things.
... bounce back is an elegant solution ...
Solution? What problem does it solve? It's one of a limited number of behaviours that a GUI might be made to exhibit when overshooting on touch-scrolling, but it's not the only one (though, to my mind, not the best) and they're all pretty obvious.