Customer service and sales is apparently is A-OK if done by any other company, but if done by Apple suddenly it's "manipulating customers?". Absolute hogwash.
I learned the same techniques working at Radio Shack and EB Games, and no one there accused me of 'manipulating customers'. I think what a lot of people miss is that if you 'manipulate' someone into buying what they don't want or what isn't right for them, then at the best case you've lost a return customer and all their associated referrals, and at the worst case, you'll have a return to deal with, as well as a lost return customer and referrals, plus a negative reputation with them and their friends.
Sales, good sales anyway, isn't about tricking someone into buying your product. It's about finding out what it is that they really need (not what they think they need, or what they want), and providing that to them first. Sometimes that does mean upselling them to a better system. Sometimes it means downselling them to a cheaper system with upgrades. If someone is mostly going to work at home with an external monitor, and they're mostly going to use Aperture or Lightroom, a 13" Macbook Pro with 8 GB of RAM may be better than a 15" Macbook Pro with 4 GB of RAM. If it's an iMac for a classroom, a larger screen will be better so more people can see what's happening at once.
Best Buy (and other customer-hostile stores) do this by convincing people not to buy Macs, opting instead for Windows laptops that will need more maintenance (upselling them with service packages, Geek Squad, etc). That's the sort of 'manipulation' that people associate with sales, and it's really too bad.
Thanks for the comment and listening to my feedback. And thanks for "giving it!"