I agree in the eyes of the law they are probably fakes.
But if I drop my ipod and smash the screen and knacker the hard drive. I then buy a new screen and hard drive and fit it myself and I then sell it, am I breaking the law? Probably not. But I am selling an Ipod that hasn't been assembled by the factory.
So if we take a stage further a company buys a few hundred smashed ipods and the company buys parts and fits them in the ipods and then sells them? Are they breaking the law? There are many companies that sell repaired ipods.
This is where the line between fake products and genuine becomes rather blurred.