Your intuition is right. Einstein is famous for the theory of relativity not because he was the first discoverer of the relativity equations (they're called the Lorentz transformation for a reason), but because he proposed that the speed of light was encoded in the structure of the universe, and that the universe is not the three-dimensional Euclidean space we think it is.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#E... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space -- the space of special relativity