According to this article, Pixar doesn't treat its employees as nicely these days: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-stranahan/lucasfilm-and-pi...
The no-cold-call policy did not mean that employees were off limits completely. We hired lots of people from ILM, Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, etc, but they came to us.
The "evil" of this particular case is pretty overstated. I was there at the time, and basically understood it was happening, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. All those other VFX houses treated their employees like cattle.
I suppose that's mostly the case anywhere, but film releases are, I think, on somewhat tight schedules to hit release windows. Cause a three month delay in the release of a Pixar movie and you might remove a potentially huge summer competitor from the field.
As long as unhappy employees are able to look elsewhere on their own initiative, it doesn't seem that bad.