Some people will never admit they are wrong...
(I'm going to get that on a t-shirt, printed in block letters: "Stallman is correct.")
He was tactically wrong in taking an expansive view of both what free software licenses should enforce and what fell within their realm of enforcement. He was hoping that GCC would be so much better than the competition that people would use it despite it being GPL, and for a long while (e.g., NeXT's Objective-C patches) it was. But the GPL, especially the GPLv3, was perceived as way more onerous than Stallman expected it would be, and eventually it became worth people investing heavily in a competitor just to avoid the GPL. If he had aimed a little less high with the GPL and admitted a plugin architecture / documented IR for GCC earlier, then LLVM may never have taken off.
Alternatively, he was tactically wrong in thinking that strong copyleft was required to achieve the goal of software freedom. Note that the clang in the NDK "is now a nearly pure upstream clang," not because they're required to, but because the pace of modern software development makes it genuinely easier to voluntarily submit changes upstream.
You can't do anything about haters.
Steve Jobs' perception, and NeXT/Apple's perception, never changed. What changed is that in the NeXT days, GCC was so much better that Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of using GCC even though we don't want the GPL. A few years ago Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of avoiding the GPL even though we want GCC. And they went and invested significant resources into LLVM.
The GPL was meant to be a tool to get people who did not perceive free software as in their best interest to contribute to free software anyway. It might not have changed whether they were "haters" as a matter of opinion, but it was definitely intended to change their concrete actions. And it did -- for a very long time.
It's much easier to compare them philosophically.
Commercial/ Proprietary - unrestricted free market capitalism
Copyleft licenses - socialist (not communist, there's a difference people, learn it) / commercial cooperative (think farmers cooperatives and anyone who might use a .coop domain)
Permissive licenses - various anarchistic philosophical positions
Market anarchism is much more compatible with existing corporate dynamics so it's pretty easy to see why it's trending this way.
Due to his stubbornness in not accepting the realpolitik the savannah has now become a reservation that is shrinking daily as people abandon it for more liberal climes.
The upshot is that the GPL just creates additional friction for developers in the pursuit of ideals that, statistically speaking, nobody really cares about. This is why it is misguided.
The primary purpose of the GPL is to insure that users have the freedom to modify and redistribute the software they use should they choose to do so. Whether the user does so or not is irreverent. That's why I don't think it's a matter of whether end users care, or how large of a percentage they form of the overall user base.
Developers who decide to license their work under the GPL do so to safeguard their own freedom and the freedom of their users. To that end, I think the GPL hits its mark.