What does cloning a template do? It seems to just make an alias and not a copy of the template.
I don’t understand your question fully.
You are cloning settings that are defined for that model by the xml files.
Since each model is different I define different XML files for each phone type. Therefore you wouldn’t want to see tons of buttons on a device that doesn’t have or support those buttons so when you ‘clone’ you are saying “I only want to see settings from this type of phone”