Pulse doesn't charge you to add the NYTimes RSS feed to their application any more than the iphone itself charges you to do it.
If I'm Opera, for example, selling browser software to people for browsing / reading nytimes.com, am I allowed or not?
I think if you were so inclined, you could probably consider Internet Explorer the same. It's only made available to Microsoft's own Windows customers.
Selling feedreaders is not ok?
not the issue. the issue is that the nytimes was included as a default feed - and is used as a showcase for the app (note that they also make use of the nytimes name, logo etc.)