Where did he say pirating anything was okay?
The level of hypocrisy around here is incredible. The only occurrence of the text string "not stealing" in this whole tread is in my post right here.
Also, I think you're wrong: pirating a movie/book/whatever will at most result in the price of one movie/book being lost from the creators (given that I may or may not have bought it legally otherwise). Copying an app, on the other hand, can result in a (theoretically) unlimited number of apps being purchased where the money doesn't go to the original creators. That is more like ripping a dvd and posting it to a torrent site.
I'm not saying pirating is defensible, but downloading something illegally is far less harmful than copying someone's app.
Stealing something to resell it for a profit is rightly a much worse transgression than stealing it for personal use, as you're only denying a single potential sale (your own) as opposed to actually stealing multiple REAL sales and keeping all the profit.
As long as both instances are stealing, I have no problem. Relative badness is another debate, but I doubt we'd disagree much on that.
Not that that argument is exactly where I would stand, but I think you're on shaky ground to call them the same crime with the difference being magnitude.
As well, you are acting as though this thread of conversation is trying to justify one while demonizing the other. No one has made any kind of statement at all justifying copyright infringement. I don't understand your accusation in the context of this thread.