I do think Apple was right to remove support for their crappy reader. In any domain where you have tons of options (like rss readers) I'd rather have no feature than a poorly executed one. No feature means I'll go out and get a good version of it. A poorly executed feature (especially from apple) means I'll probably put up with it longer than I should.

However, given that they were going about destroying access to user's data (the collection of rss feeds), I think the classy move would have been to run a script on install that checks if the user is subscribed to any feeds. If they are, export them into a well formatted file on the desktop, and give the user an alert through that highly touted new alert system, and give them a link to the app store that searches for rss readers that can receive the exported file. They'd get to introduce a bunch of new features that they seem to be very proud of, and they wouldn't destroy[1] a user's access to their own data. Which does seem like a pretty big deal to me.

[1]Yes, I know she was able to access her data eventually. That seemed like an unacceptably difficult process to go through for the sort of users Apple is trying to appeal to.