First a caveat, I'm an engineer and not a lawyer. But I have written several patent applications and I have a patent pending, and I have worked patent lawyers as an expert to determine potential infringement in circuitry. So I have some experience with patents.
Patent ligitation is very rarely black and white. First, as an engineer, I've never heard of anyone looking through patent documents in order to figure out how to do something - about the only reason to check the patent database is to make sure something you are doing hasn't been invented or to figure out what sorts of things companies are working on so that you know what they are up to. Patents are confusing legal documents that are particularly hard to for laypeople engineers to read and thus any idea that engineers at one company deliberately copied patented ideas from another company seems unlikely based on my experience. What tends to happen is engineers come to an idea separately and independently as a solution to a problem, someone patents it and then later people come back say that the solution infringes on other designs that were designed in parallel.
Accidently implementing someone's patent is not a defense, but it does allow people to generally be somewhat sympathetic to the accused.
The second reason that patents lawsuits are hard is that patents are written to be as general as possible, patent examiners spend effort narrowing the scope of the patent, and the final result tends to be something in which you can change one or two things and no longer be infringing. So just copying an idea - deliberately or not - is allowed as long as you don't implement it exactly as it is in the patent. Again, patents are deliberately vague specifically to deal with this, but as someone who has analyzed designs to determine potential infringment, I can say that it doesn't take big changes to make something infringe or to avoid it.
Next, here are the patents in question. I looked them up in Google's patent search (yes, the irony is intentional) and then wrote a one sentence summary based on my very quick read of the abstract of the patent:
6125447 - security using protection domains which estabilishes permissions assigned to code entering a device.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=dyQGAAAAEBAJ
6192476 - controlling access by a thread to a resource based on permissions from routines in a stack
http://www.google.com/patents?id=G1YGAAAAEBAJ
5966702 - packaging class files together to remove duplicate information by determining memory allocation requirements in advance to set of classes rather than individual classes.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=TzsPAAAAEBAJ
7426720 - a system for dynamic preloading of classes through memory space cloning of a master runtime system process so that child runtime processes inherit the memory state of the parent.
6910205 compiling virtual machine (VM) instructions for a function into native machine instructions to improve the execution speed of VM.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=U-4UAAAAEBAJ
6061520 improves initialization of static arrays by preloading all class files, determining the initialization performed by them and then consolidating them into a single expression.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=mEwEAAAAEBAJ
Again, I'm not quite sure what to make of these. I'm a hardware engineer, and software is not my expertise, and I'm not very knowledgeable in Java or VM's.
If Google sticks to the usual patent lawsuit script, they will file a countersuit allegeding Oracle's infringement of their patents, there will be a long drawn out deposition process involving literal mountains of paperwork and lots of emails. Then generally patent infringement cases are settled - often by some form of cross-licensing agreement and a bit of cash to sweeten the weaker portfolio's side. The cases tend to be long, and they are incredibly risky to the accused since a "jury of peers" generally are not experts in the specifics of, in this case, virtual machines and Java JIT compilers and a guilty verdict generally involves a crazy amount of money and, usually, an injunction which stops the sale of all infringing designs (in this case, it would halt all Android sales, and possibly the App Market (since the apps were written with the SDK), as well as the removal of the SDK).
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