None of those “innovators” Gates borrowed from were going to do anything with their inventions until Gates et al put the inventions together in a way that would create products that would sell. That was the genius of Gates. Do you want to say he cheated these innovators? Fair enough, but it wasn’t Apple, IBM or Amiga that took the markets by storm, it was Windows based PC’s tied with Intel CPU’s.
As I recall, it was MS-DOS that Gates and Allen (may he RIP) created and sold to IBM that got Microsoft off the ground in the microcomputer world.
Windows was actually subordinate to DOS until NT and XP came along in the late ‘90s, and even then it was slow and prone to blue-screen failures when the host computer wasn’t up to snuff. IMHO, it was the hardware advances—faster CPUs, bigger disks, cheaper memory—that made it possible for Windows to dominate the market.
I will give Bill Gates credit for anticipating many of those things and urging h/w manufacturers to make their stuff “Windows compatible” so he could increase his market share, but I still consider Steve Jobs to be unmatched as the greatest innovator (so far) in the rather short history of personal computing.