There is little question that, from a design standpoint alone, Barnes & Noble’s Nook is the most innovative, feature-laden eBook reader in its class. According to Spring Design, a fellow gadget-based company out of California, that’s no coincidence. They’re alleging that B&N’s new Kindle-killer is based on ideas and designs pulled straight from their own dual-screen Android-based e-reader, the Alex.

It would seem the two companies have been collaborating since earlier this year, under an agreement that Spring Design hoped would lead to a full-fledged partnership. Instead, they’re now accusing Barnes and Noble of violating their non-disclosure agreements and “misappropriating trade secrets.”

“We showed the Alex e-book design to Barnes & Noble in good faith with the intention of working together to provide a superior dual screen e-book to the market,” said Eric Kmiec, Spring Design’s VP of sales and marketing, in a statement. According to documents they filed in court, a B&N executive even went as far as warning Spring Design not to consider Amazon as a partner, because their competitor would just “steal Spring’s unique idea without ever buying anything from Spring.” Yikes.

Now instead of a partnership between the two companies, Spring Design filed a lawsuit on Monday and further announced their intention to launch their Alex e-Reader in January in direct competition with Barnes & Noble. The book-seller does not appear to be commenting on the substance of the lawsuit at this time.

The biggest consequence of this new development is not, as it would seem at first, the presence of another competitor on the marketplace. It’s true that both the Alex and the Nook feature color touchscreen navigation and utilize Google’s Android operating system, but the Alex is, as far as we can tell, merely a standalone device. The Nook’s greatest strengths are still the ability to lend books to friends as well as the device’s inevitable ubiquity in the nation’s largest book retailer, something Spring Design can hardly replicate on their own.

No, the most interesting part of this lawsuit is the potential injunction that a judge could put on Barnes & Noble, preventing them from releasing the Nook until the situation is resolved in court. It already seemed far too late in the year for them to release it for this holiday season, but this pending litigation makes that a virtual impossibility. And while I highly doubt that a big corporation like B&N can be gummed up in court for too long, it certainly gives Spring Design the opportunity to get their e-Reader out there first to make the Nook look the copy-cat.

I guess it just goes to show that whenever you spot innovation anywhere in the business world, it’s probably only coming about second-hand. And so much for that.

We’ll be keeping tabs on how this affects the release of the Nook, once B&N sees fit to comment.