If not, I suspect it's that most people already understand that a hosted service, like Facebook, is inherently a walled garden, and hence it's not surprising when something like this happens. Apple's control over what you can and can't do with hardware and software that you own is a little more alarming perhaps?
I appreciate that you're taking a user-centric approach to the issue, but the majority of complaints I seem to hear about Apple come from developers who want to deploy on/in Apple's space (which includes hardware, but more often concerns iTunes). These two complaints sound very similar: "company X won't let me do what I want to do in their environment."
Hard to tell what the parent meant, but I took "Apple's hardware" to mean the infrastructure that runs the App Store and iTunes platform (like using Facebook's hardware to run there).
I agree the complaints sound similar. I'm not entirely convinced of the difference myself. I was just positing a likely reason for the difference in reaction to the two situations.
But I will also stick up for the user-centric perspective. I will never forget how Apple treated Google with respect to Google Voice. In that specific case Apple made up some very capricious arguments to avoid allowing an extremely useful app from appearing in the App Store, which would have hurt me directly had I owned an iPhone instead of an Android device.
The "just jailbreak your phone" argument isn't useful in my opinion. It's an easy way to avoid the actually difficult questions that arise from what Apple has done with the App Store.
Would "just jailbreak your phone" be acceptable advice to give to your mother, who is always rolled out as the beneficiary of Apple's tight control over the App Store ecosystem, if she were to want to obtain the recently banned Readability app? If not, then we shouldn't be using it as a way to sweep these discussions under the rug.
It's not circumvention because it was explicitly permitted in an exemption.
HOWEVER, there's still a big gotcha: that permission does NOT exempt you from the "trafficking" provisions of the DMCA. So you're not actually allowed to "manufacture" or "import" a circumvention device.
In other words, it's a catch-22, where you're allowed to do it but denied the means, because you're not allowed to make or acquire the tools to do so.
As to the question about Apple, I don't like this move: it's sort of like they don't want people to let people know all the creepy things people can learn by knowing your entire social graph. But they have no trouble using that data themselves. I solve this issue the same way I do with Apple: I have no Facebook account.
EDIT: This article is about something else, but it has a pretty good explanation of what the DMCA means by "trafficking" and why it's so crazy:
It's possible that a court would exempt you from trafficking if your tool only worked for an exempted work, but nobody has tested this in court, so you do that at your own risk.
