That's all nice and well, but what if some country decides that your country will still have Internet access, but a "degraded experience" to Apple's central infrastructure?

Still sounds to me like Apple rolled out a huge (logical) trojan horse, as a potential weapon in terms of nation state cyber warfare.

Probably not at all with that intention. But I doubt that any government willing to abuse this "opportunity" will give a fuck about that. Don't underestimate the power (and disruptive) effects of being able to practically disable a whole brand of popular computer hardware. Heck, even the ability to threaten with it (privately, through diplomatic channels) can (and probably should) be considered a serious weapon. So yeah .. "thank you" Apple.

From my experience during this outage, the ability for the computer to "open" may not actually mean much. While trying to fix what I assumed was a localized software issue I rebooted my machine. Typically this takes a minute or two. However during Apple's systems outage my rebooting took approximately an hour before my computer was in any way functional again.

so you can't even reboot without phoning home.

Or can you still reboot without wifi?

In this case, any app would take five to ten minutes to open. While that technically means "it still opens", it effectively renders the computer unusable.

(And that's after I realized that they will eventually open. Originally I rebooted the machine before any app had had a chance to open.)