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The difference, trespassor, is that Lanthum has seen and even worked extensively with the ROM code. Where copyright rulings are concerned, seeing and working with the actual code is very different than seeing and working with an interface.
Your operating system analogy would be more consistent with a situation in which someone who has played on a ROM mud, but never saw the code, decided to write an original code with results comparable to the ROM mud they played.
(Of course, that isn't to say that copying an interface is necessarily okay either, even if the code itself is original. I'm just saying that the distinction is generally considered a lot less grey if a designer has extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the product they are emulating.)
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