"they encrypt" can mean several different things. It's understandable that a naive ordinary internet user may get confused about the differences between "We use SSL" vs "We use client-side encryption and never see your passphrase" vs "we promise to encrypt your data before it's stored on third party servers". However, there's no excuse for any technically inclined person to confuse those things.
Dropbox had said that they encrypt data before storing it at Amazon, but their systems see all of your raw data because they do deduplication, and because they could reset your passphrase, and because client-side encryption of stored data would make web access very complicated if not impossible.
If all that weren't enough, the dropbox forums, long before the early 2011 PR problem, had threads about using truecrypt containers on dropbox shares to ensure security. It also had feature requests to add client-side encryption to the dropbox client. If some people didn't get the message that dropbox has access to raw data, after all of that evidence, they have only themselves to blame.