And I'm glad they did. Judging from Apple's business model, it would have been yet another closed off, keep your data social network. I've been dying for an open network like Google+, and I think things played out quite well.
"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file."
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-to-...
They're right. Programmatic export of friends' email addresses is too ripe for abuse in the world we live in.