(Images courtesy of The Register and Giz-China)

You’ve gotta love the Chinese knock-off market: After one company’s attempt to threaten Apple with stealing their tablet idea for the iPad failed, they turned right around and ripped off Cupertino instead.

The Register is reporting on Shenzhen Great Loong Brother, a Chinese tablet PC maker who raised some eyebrows last month when they claimed that Apple stole their six-month-old P88 tablet for the iPad. “I was very angry and surprised two days ago when I saw the news of the iPad presentation,” Shenzhen president Wu Xiaolong told the Spanish news site El Mundo in early February. “It is certainly our design.”

After getting nowhere with idle legal threats, the Chinese tablet maker has now turned around and stolen the look & feel of Mac OS X, “pasted it onto Windows, and installed it on their aforementioned touchscreen tablet,” The Register reports.

Most comically, while the engineers at Shenzhen Great Loong Brother have indeed captured the spirit of Cupertino as seen in the photos here from Chinese gadget blog Giz-China, they failed to copy the correct device -- their P88 now looks like a Mac OS X device and not the iPad that they were screaming about Apple emulating in the first place.

Better luck next time, guys.