Their NDA for the iPhone, and the tyranny over the application store, are worse than anything Microsoft has done to the consumer. They're just limited in scope by the fact that they own such a small % of the overall phone market, but if they ever get the kind of market share there that Windows has, everyone will hate them far more.
Without the DRM, we'd see a much more fragmented player market. iPods might still be the leaders, but they'd almost certainly have a lower market share.
People think iPod sounds reliable, and MP3 player sounds unstable. They go for the iPod because they think it's the only one there is.
My only argument is that Apple has caused much less damage than Microsoft because they have been less successful, and in that sense Microsoft maintains the greater negative karma balance. Difference between attempted murder and committed murder, I suppose.
I find the grudge most people in the community have against MS a little juvenile and not very well-reasoned.
Since Netscape was taken down, we've seen a world where hackers can execute an idea and become successful based on their execution, sometimes abundantly so. I do not think it's accidental that this period largely coincides with Microsoft losing their anti-trust case.
Before then, Microsoft would just wait until a market formed, then take it over or destroy it by bundling something with one of their monopoly products. People who had a dream of creating a successful software business knew Microsoft's business practices made that extremely unlikely.
So, yes, many developers who were around during Microsoft's heyday likely are carrying a grudge that must seem juvenile to anyone familiar with the much less threatening Microsoft of today. Whether it's juvenile to have bad feelings towards an organization that snuffed out a lot of optimism and ambition, I'll leave to you to decide.
But I think the point still stands that Microsoft has managed to cause far more harm during their reign than Apple, precisely because they have been more successful. I also think that Apple is somewhat constrained in the damage they can do, because Steve Jobs wants to be a Tyrant of Taste, more so than Ruler of All He Surveys. He has little interest, for example, in the mass business market or the clunky boxes at the bottom of the market. To have Apple branded boxes at that price range, with all the compromises that entails, seems to horrify Jobs.
As for other product areas, probably the most tyrannical is iTunes. But even there, the damage is constrained by the fact that the majority of people still just pirate their music, anyway.