Tusi discovering laws of planetary motion before Kepler?

[FortranMan]

I was reading about the Tusi couple and read it "as a solution for the latitudinal motion of the inferior planets, and later used extensively as a substitute for the equant". Since the Tusi couple is related to plotting out an ellipse, did Nasir al-Din al-Tusi already discover the laws for planetary motion before Kepler?

 

[phyzguy]

Since the Tusi Couple is a hypocycloid, and the actual orbits are ellipses, how could this be said to be a discovery of the planetary laws before Kepler? Also, what about Kepler's second and third laws, which are probably more important than the first?