The harder part is really looking at your users, how they use the product, what they want - but not what they say they want. With my product, we have people requesting features of the 'big dog' - only because that's what they've seen. We're not about to blindly implement what a competitor does just because they did it - it's assuming they did the research into that feature, and we don't have to.

Anyway, essentially - it's really hard to not copy a competitor when that's all your users are vocally asking for is to do just that.