And that matters more to them than whatever his true intentions might have been when he uttered that statement.
No it's much more than that. You forgot the wiretapping advocates and corporations like AT&T who will most likely use this quote to support their position.
In order to be outraged about this quote, you have to ignore the fact that ES is a smart guy and interpret the sentence as literally as possible (while simultaneously ignoring the implications of the word "maybe"). Then you have to take it out of context, and apply it to situations that ES obviously wasn't referring to.
People are making Eric Schmidt into the bad guy here, because they want him to be the bad guy. And that matters more to them than whatever his true intentions might have been when he uttered that statement.