The 10 pulls per IP per hour isn't my main concern. 40 pulls per hour for an authenticated user may be a little low, if you're trying out something new.

The unauthenticated limit doesn't bother me as much, though I was little upset when I first saw it. Many business doesn't bother setting up their own registry, even though they should, nor do they care to pay for the service. I suspect that many doesn't even know that Docker can be used without Docker Hub. These are the freeloaders Docker will be targetting. I've never worked for company that was serious about Docker/Kubernetes and didn't run their own registry.

One major issue for Docker is that they've always ran a publicly available registry, which is the default and just works. So people have just assumed that this was how Docker works and they've never bothered setting up accounts for developers nor production systems.