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Some have claimed that declaring a patent exhausted and declaring it not infringed is inconsistent.

Where it would be inconsistent is if something in the product apart from the baseband chips had infringed the patent.

I.e. (say) you put two baseband chips in the phone (maybe for different bands). One is an Intel chip made under license from Samsung. The other is an unlicensed knockoff. You couldn't then argue exhaustion because the intel license wouldn't extend to the knockoff. That's what the last paragraph in the juror instructions is saying.

So it could be that what the Jury meant was "yes, the patent on the chips was exhausted, no nothing else in the iDevice infringed those patents"... which is actually the crucial question even if it didn't quite match the instructions.

Its also perfectly reasonable (insofar as anything involving software patents is reasonable) to say "yes this patent is valid, but the holders haven't proven that this particular product violates it." Particularly likely with patents that sound impossibly broad from the one-line description but actually depend on lots of detailed claims.

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OTOH I think you could bring up other cases where the argument's been exactly the opposite: that the legal purchase of a chip outside the US does not exhaust the patent when the chip is then imported into the US. The usual cases involve grey-market goods: items and devices that're manufactured and legally sold in other countries and then imported into the United States without an explicit license to do so. If patents are exhausted then companies can't prevent those grey-market goods from being brought into the US (once the goods were legally sold the patent holder's gotten his royalty and can't claim further control over them), but if patents aren't exhausted then Samsung's claims still hold (if they didn't explicitly license Intel to manufacture those chips for sale in the US).

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