It may mean something to competing businesses, but we don't have to care.
This patenting question seems to be in its very early stages, and it will be interesting to witness how the patenting issues play out over the next several years.. because it causes a few kinds of conflicting incentives.
Yes, hedgewizard is correct that the decentralized aspect of bitcoin could give a shit about patents; however, patents are going to affect various centralized systems that attempt to build upon bitcoin... causing incentives to be the first and to exclude others while at the same time potentially causing abilities for bigger capitalized companies (that build upon bitcoin technologies) to beat up upon smaller capitalized companies.
In some sense, the patenting of these matters and attempts at such patenting, may cause a lot more considerations regarding how to build decentralized systems on top of bitcoin... in other words, decentralized built upon decentralized.. and in that way, there would be no one to go after in terms of attempting to enforce patents (even though possibly some individuals or companies, to the extent that they can be identified as violating patents could still be harassed through lawsuits, etc).
On the other hand, some companies and individuals may identify some of the down the road problems associated with either being identifiable and taking other measures to minimize patent lawsuit risk, and even though the patenting infrastructure can seem as a kind of bitcoin downside, it does seems to be a fairly manageable risk, especially with some foresight regarding that risk.