What are they supposed to do? Believe everyone that calls up with "I got locked out?"
I kind of wish that they had a way to lock possibly stolen accounts and allow people to verify their ID at an Apple Store or something, though.
Perhaps they could prompt users to keep local backups of their icloud data rather than pretending it's impossible to lose info in the cloud.
The article doesn't say that happened, though. It just says "My brother got his iPhone stolen at gunpoint." If the victim had been made to hand over his password, that's a very very huge detail the blogger did not include.
I had my phone stolen from me at Pride in SF and went through a lot of the same steps. The thieves yanked the SIM immediately. I was able to follow the phone as it hopped onto public wifi networks (mostly at stores) that I had joined before. it finally wound up in Shenzhen, China.