iPad jailbreak after less than 24 hours

Even the title of the story is "Apple says jailbreaking is illegal". But it is regardless of what Apple said. It's a half-truth, and the half that's left out changes the implication of what is left. The lede repeats this. They also leave out the relevant detail that Apple's filing was a response to a proposed class of exemptions, not an activist effort on their part. Indeed, the relationship between the two documents is not made clear at all. Where you say "and Apple responded" in your summary, you're not getting that from the EFF's article. Read it again.

If the EFF claimed to be an unbiased news organization, I'd believe that it was a simple mistake, but they don't so I don't. They want to make Apple look like a big bad bully (which is their right and natural from their position, of course), but the way they chose to do so has perpetuated misinformation. I think that sucks rather independently of my disagreement with them.

I don't think it was intentional deception, just a nasty side effect of opinionated reporting. The EFF even hosts a copy of the same document under the link title Apple Reply to Proposed Jailbreaking Exemption (on this page http://www.eff.org/cases/2009-dmca-rulemaking), which manages to say in six words that the blog post managed not to at all.

So anyone who jailbreaks their iPhone should be considered a criminal?

I said I don't agree with the EFF. If someone has a better argument, I might agree with that. In principle, I don't agree with the notion that buying a device means you have the right to infringe on the copyright of the software it came with any more than buying a book gives you the right to infringe on the copyright of the text.

Not to knock on the router, but I seriously doubt its hackability had any major influence on its success.