It might be useful to note that Bitcoin Cash isn't the first coin to be initially distributed to Bitcoin holders. I believe there are have been two other just this year, and I don't know how many in total.

Coinbase has not honored giveaways of these previous coins to their customers, so it sort of makes sense that they treat this one exactly the same. Otherwise they'd have to answer why they treated this one differently.

(Most other coins have just copied the UXTO set from a certain block height and not the entire historical blockchain. This saves a lot of space as you can start with megabytes of data instead of a hundred gigabytes. There are probably marketing reasons why it was made this way.)

Which other coins? Coinbase doesn't support many types of coins (only BTC, ETH, LTC), so I'm not surprised they are ignoring smaller coins. I just assumed they were not worth the hassle?

Ironically, Coinbase holding onto the Bitcoin Cash (by not supporting it, and hence not letting their users sell it) is probably helping it, since Coinbase users cannot dump their BCC for a quick buck. As you say, it's kind of a giveaway..

This is seems susceptible to a lawsuit. It would be the equivalent of a stock M/A or spin-off and your broker refusing to give you any stock issuance you were to receive.

Or is it something like this: SingerSoft has decided to give 1 share of SingerSoft owner of each share of Microsoft. Unfortunately you're broker isn't going to add it to your account for you.

Anyone is free to create a fork though, only the company you own shares in can make changes to the shares. If I create a fork of BCC called BCC Plus are you going to lose it when your favorite exchange doesn't give you what's yours?