Werkzeug had an example with the same semantics (decorator for URL rules and returning strings and response objects from functions) for a long time. But neither did Werkzeug come up with that, the original idea was TurboGears which did it that way. So by that logic, bottle is a cheap knockoff.

However, I do have to point out that denied is a joke which should be pretty obvious from reading the source and watching the screencast (and quite frankly, just by looking at the website in detail).

Saying it's a cheap knockoff is harsh.

Every new framework copies something from existing ones. Setting routes with a decorator seems pretty obvious if you've seen Sinatra, and the templating language is more inspired by Django than anything else.