It looks like every day that passes, Apple is trying to really demonstrate they're the new Microsoft.
Apple is easy to avoid, trivial even, you can buy one of many other music players, buy other phones and use other media managers. You don't need to use any Apple product unless you opt-in to their system (buying a device) and even if you do opt-in, if you buy DRM-free tracks (which Apple pushed for, btw) you can leave iTunes any time you want if you buy a non-Apple device (the only exception being video which is still DRM-laden AFAIK).
Old Microsoft was impossible to avoid because government and businesses opted you in, and you couldn't opt-out no matter how hard you tried if you wanted to interact with those systems. Word documents were difficult or impossible to reverse engineer and MS did what it could to prevent any advancement in that area, and Exchange was nearly impossible to interface with (it's still problematic) if you weren't using Outlook.
I mean, it's not like government and businesses are using iTunes and thereby forcing people to buy Apple products to interact with the corporate iTunes system (as was the case with old Microsoft, Exchange and Office).
Besides, Apple is certainly behaving badly, granted, but in this case they aren't even pressuring the labels to stop doing business with Amazon, they're pressuring them to stop giving Amazon a day of exclusivity. The Old Microsoft way was to threaten to cut off vendors just for competing, not for giving a competitor an advantage.
Moreover they aren't even threatening to stop selling their product (as Amazon did with Macmillan's books), but to "[withdraw] marketing support for certain releases featured as Daily Deals". i.e. "If you use their promotion, you won't get ours." The idea that the labels don't like this is not surprising, because the labels love getting favors from everybody. What is surprising is that so many comments here seem to be in favor of the labels' interests.
What specific incident(s) are you referring to? The closest thing I can think of is threatening to witholding volume discounts based on vendor behavior. As I understand it this practice is only illegal because the dominant market position of Windows and Office makes MS (retroactively) a monopoly. If a small startup did the same thing that would be fine both legally and (IMO) morally. I don't know of any cases where a vendor was threatened with not being able to sell Windows or Office (i.e., "cut off"), however.
It looks like they are satisfied with what they've done, now they're just counting their chips. They are one of the big boys, the fat cats. Apple, as we used to know it, is dead.
Or something along those lines...