Maybe I'm weird, but my respect for a company that did that would go way up, not down.
Obviously they wouldn't say "we were stupid", but I'd absolutely appreciate an admission along the lines of, "during our design journey over the past X years, we've realized our customers prefer having a full function key row on their keyboard / more ports / MagSafe / etc., so we've listened and are bringing them back!" To me, that signals a group of folks who know they are fallible, listen to customers, and do their best to meet customer needs.
But of course admitting those sorts of things wouldn't be consistent with Apple's brand. Apple is all about "we know better than you know what you want and can do no wrong". Which is fine, and seems to have created a lot of success for them, but it's always turned me off.
I think technically-minded people would take that well, but the business/management types don't like doing stuff like this, likely because it has a chance of making the stock fall (or even just not rise as much as they wanted it to).
"We heard your feedback and we listened."
But yes, I don't care how they market it. They'd be dumb to pause and say "oh yeah we were stupid, here's your old toys back."