First, GPLv3's patent provisions are not particularly strong compared to other open source licenses.
Second, this has nothing to do with anything, and certainly isn't a reason for Apple avoidance of GPLv3.
Apple was almost unilaterally concerned with the installation information requirements in GPLv3 (that would require providing signing keys and allowing modifications/reverse engineering), not the patent provisions. They said so, multiple times in the various working groups/mailing lists/etc for GPLv3. Heck, APSL, The Apple Public Source License, version 2.0, which apple released tons of source under, predates GPLv3 by 4 years (2003 vs 2007), and happily grants patents.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/
Apple, for the record, was willing to give the GCC project all of the code to LLVM under the GPL and non-assert any patents (and to my knowledge, Apple has not filed patents on any part of LLVM that they have contributed to publicly)
Apple has also contributed to tons of Apache licensed code and similar code that requires contributors grant patent licenses.
I work for Google, and have personally seen them contribute code to our projects with patent licenses (though admittedly, not as much as they used to). Additionally, I worked on both LLVM and GCC, and was involved directly in the various plans WRT to LLVM and GCC merging. Same with GPLv3 stuff, etc.
There are plenty of things to rake Apple over the coals over, and plenty of reasons why Apple disliked GPLv3, but what you cite simply isn't one of them.