Lack of Vorbis support you can just about give a pass on since it might confuse users and spoil the Apple vibe. Not implementing FLAC in favour of your own homebrew ripoff that you don't licence out is just unforgiveable. Again, I've said before that, for me personally, was the point that Apple jumped the shark.
Sansa's the number two in the iPod/DMP market, one of their latest models drops AAC support, while retaining mp3, WMA, Vorbis and FLAC. If the web follows Youtube to WebM I can see similar playing out for H.264, though more realistically it's H.265 that's been strangled at birth.
edit: The first paragraph above may come off as too harsh on Theora, and too easy on Apple. For what it was proposed as, a baseline web format that would be guaranteed to work everywhere for your cat videos, government speeches, educational content, wikipedia footage of rare animals etc. Theora was and is perfectly suited just as gif and jpeg get the job done today despite better alternatives. It was Apple and their supporters that framed this as "there can only be one" codec and I guess they're reaping the whirlwind on that now.
It's conceivable that when someone says they're assembling a patent pool, that means that patent owners are selling/transferring their patents into a non-practicing corporation, which will then litigate. Since the patents are now held by a non-practicing entity, Google's revocation is meaningless.
MP3 and AAC had better hardware decoding support than Vorbis. That affects Apple a lot. Theora (to my knowledge) doesn't have chipsets made for it. On a mobile device, you kinda need hardware decoding for both processing time and battery life. With Google's weight behind VP8 and Vorbis, Broadcomm has committed to implementing it in their chips. Qualcomm is also on board with WebM. So, that might assuage Apple's concerns.
In terms of patents (which is one way Apple argued against Theora): I think this situation might be different as well. First, it looks like it'll be implemented by a large number of rich companies quickly (Google, Qualcomm, AMD, Broadcom. . .). When people pushed Apple for Theora support, who was implementing it? Who has implemented it? Few. Having lots of rich companies in the same boat means more people to to defend against patent holders. And, to be fair to Apple, I don't really know of mobile devices that have implemented Theora. It's nice to have someone else go first and prove that it can be done. I mean, from what I know, Android doesn't support Theora. Anyway, with the weight and excitement, we're likely to see patents come to light, if any, sooner rather than later.
Plus, Google wisely put a clause in the license saying that you lose rights to their patents if you take action against anyone using WebM. If there's enough weight behind WebM, it's going to be hard for people to pass up access to those patents. If WebM becomes web video, you're not going to want to sue a WebM user and then potentially be permanently banned from playing in the web video game. Think about it: 5 years down the line Qualcomm, Broadcom, and other chipset makers decide they can save a lot of money implementing WebM rather than MP3/AAC/H.264. Most web video has gone WebM. It's what people support. Then someone comes along with a patent. They're not going to want to be excluded from being able to push video to the millions of devices out there that are WebM devices.
But yes, I shouldn't be so confident. I think I've made my case that Apple is more likely to support this than previous free stuff, but you make a good point.