would you admitt to taking ideas from other games and intergrating them into your future games?
Admit? I really got to wonder which world you are living in. I think the appropriate description would be "Acknowledge the influence" - and anyone who claims that he is completely unaffected by the games, books, other media he consumes is either a liar or deceiving himself. Ever asked yourself why there is more than just one brand of car, mp3 player, bread or cake available on the market? Where do you think things like "hit points" you see in every single rpg out there? Why is there Call of Duty, Return to Castle Wolfenstein when there is already Medal of Honor? Why is there are genre of "RTS" games and not just "Dune I to IX"? Why the sudden appearance of "MMORPGs" on the market after Everquest got so successful? I think you have a strange perception on how any kind of developement or evolution works ... the world of games would be a pretty bland place with ideas not jumping between games and genres. It's not that you go out there, pick apart other games on the market and say "hey, let's see which feature we can steal from them..." - but if you play a good game, watch a movie, read a good book, and you see something you like, it's quite likely that it will influence you, in a concious ("wouldn't it be cool if we could do mass battles like Helms Deep") or nonconcious way. I bet there are quite a few D&D campaigns running out there that suddenly had elements shown in the impressive LotR movies introduced by their DM.

The industry is quite open about this process, if you read some game developer interviews about BG, NWN or recently NWN2, you will often see references to games that are considered "influencial" by the people interviewed.

Sure, you got quite some copycats out there that go for the fast buck (just look at the number of diablo clones), but these are in 90% of the cases not games that classify as AAA games anyway and most people learn quite fast that clones seldom work as well as the original. The market is kind of self regulating, if you try to get by by just cloning other peoples ideas, you are dead in a second.

Take diablo - the basic gameplay is very close to the idea of nethak or gauntlet, but Blizzard improved, added and innovated enough to make it an insanely popular game. Other companies tried to copy and nearly all of them fell short.

Take Everquest - it's basically a MUD repackaged, down to the slash commands. The concept and idea has been around for years, but they morphed and improved the concept to a point where it could capture a huge number of people. A lot of others tried to copy and fell short, a few innovated again and managed to create and hold a bubble in the market because of their improvements/changes.