So which is it, software patents are good and this is "stealing", or software patents are bad and this is inevitable?
Now, I also think this is a dick move, but it's because of dick moves like this that the patent and copyright systems exist in the first place, and why I think they need to be reformed rather than abandoned.
When either company leverages its control over the market to exclude its competitors using mechanisms other than technical quality, that's a bad thing and needs to be condemned.
I view mobile as more of a game console than a PC, but if Apple wants to insist that they're fully functional and "post-PC", they have to live by the same standards.
Apple does not insist the post-PC devices are fully functional. In fact, Jobs compared PCs to trucks and iOS devices to cars. By post-PC they imply that lockdown that comes with it.
Everyone expects Apple to call the shots on their own app store to some extent, but it becomes unacceptable when well intentioned and heavily invested developers get screwed over by Apple making anticompetitive exceptions to their own, already volatile, set of rules.
This, however, has nothing to do with that: it's about consumer choice: making a better product and tempting people away with it is normal and healthy but abusing a lead in one market to prevent people from being able to make a choice in another is always bad.
This is the strongest criticism of Apple's app store policies: on the Mac if you get Karelia-ed that's not pleasant but it's a business risk you assume along with the possibility of any other large company entering the market. On iOS, Apple will preemptively kill your ability to sell a product before their competitor even ships, preventing your customers from even being able to decide that they prefer the app which ships with the OS.