It's been quite a while now that no matter how much you pay for a device it's still owned by the company that produces it. You're only allowed to do with it what they deem acceptable. Apple is simply the poster child for this kind of behaviour.
As long as we keep accepting that companies have a say about what we do with the property we bought from them after the moment of purchase these kinds of stories will continue.
In the case of AC2 people with legitimate UNMODIFIED games are being left without their product. I'm not supporting apple for locking the hardware but I don't think your comparison is fair. It would be a lot easier to compare with the Zune or the PS3 in which cases the platforms were also unmodified and suffered down-time due to a manufacturers mistake.
There was the PS3 incident a week or so ago and the Zune incident a couple of years ago. But I don't recall Apple having any issue like this.