Is it any sort of leap over the product's it's copying?

IBM made some decent (sometimes extremely good, even!) products in a lot of segments for a long time after losing their relevance as "driving the future of computing." But rarely as a segment-definer or introducer.

You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.