I agree. The implicit context is that it is in-bounds to investigate your competitors through their public-facing offerings, even if they try to stop you. You don't have to stop competing just because they say please. Through an accident of law (the CFAA was enacted before it was possible to get home internet service), Lyft was able to make this illegal. Lyft is trying to block public information from getting into their competitor's hands. IMO, that's the anti-competitive activity here.
But that's not a public API that Uber was tapping into. It was a private API that requires an agreement to be signed in order to access it. Uber signed and then violated the agreement, by providing fake data through the APIs.
At the moment that the agreement was broken, their access to the API become illegal.
In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong.
I think I disagree that there was no subterfuge in the Lyft case? I don't actually know this, but I assume that if Lyft knew this was happening, they would behave differently, and if the drivers knew this was happening, they would behave differently.
If you do something that you know a lot of other people would care a lot about, it is in my opinion your responsibility not to try to conceal it from them. If it's not difficult, as in this case, you should notify them explicitly.