No, i think they should be abolished, not reformed, at least in the case of software. While they may benefit the megacorps like apple, they seem to be only doing harm to the industry as a whole.
By the way, patents don't cover implementations, they cover methods. A method can be so generic that it covers all possible implementations.
Specifically, apple's 915 patent seems to cover two things: determining whether you're in scroll or zoom mode based on the number of discrete inputs on the screen, and also while zooming rubberbanding the content if zoomed out too much. The second claim is something you could replace with some other solution (and samsung did that in a software update), but the first one seems generic enough that it covers all sensible implementations of the concept.
Thus someone else demoing pinch to zoom using a different implementation is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
You guys are trying to redefine patents in order to argue that they should be "reformed"!