they prevented spontaneous reboots. if you dont think apple was right, and the tech press was engaged in yellow journalism, you are wrong. apple was mitigating a very specific hardware failure.
the solution to the problem was the correct one, they just forgot one important detail.
TELL THE USER!
As a result, plenty of people, (including myself) noticing their two year phone starting to slow down quite a bit, decided to upgrade to the new and shiny model, instead of just replacing the battery, because who would have known that was the problem?!
They did issue a mea culpa and free replacement coverage in response to that criticism, but it took a while.