Well, I've learned it just yesterday... ;-)

The *nix people like to do things in a weirdo way, so that they can't be used intuitively, as it in turn increases the value of those who learned how to use the weirdo switches and stuff, on the work market.

So patch desperately needs a switch, -p0, to work as expected. Don't ask me, what does it do. There's an extensive manpage, of which I understood only that -psomething is needed, and best something is 0. Oh, and maybe -i works, but that's not *nix-ishly cool enough, so the recommended syntax is:
patch -p0 < patchfile

I hope this helps.

Jan