Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm fairly sure Booster and Detector rails have been around longer than Railcraft.
I doubt you can call the concept of an NPC village a "ripoff". It's like saying Dragon Quest 3 ripped off Final Fantasy 3's job system; they're both similar but they have differences. Millenaire only has a bit more functionality than NPC villages at the moment.
Not to defend Mojang on this, of course. Goddamn, at least Jeb cooperated with the Pistons guy on the vanilla version of Pistons.