The NDA is irrelevant to customers. I can't see how a customer would decide to buy based on wether the company uses NDA's for certain documents.
I suppose you could argue that using an NDA might put off developers which would mean a lack of apps for the store, but customers don't care about what apps may have been rejected, they care about the apps they can use.
I don't think this is an overreaction. The NDA means that an iPhone developer can't legally blog about developing iPhone apps. That's a bit wild, isn't it?
I agree. "Evil" is silly language to use here. Unfortunately, "evil" is often used to describe Apple's biggest competitor, so we developers are used to misusing that term.
Let's take a step back and speak more clearly: what Apple is doing is harmful to its developer ecosystem. Not evil, and maybe not stupid (time will tell).
I suppose you could argue that using an NDA might put off developers which would mean a lack of apps for the store, but customers don't care about what apps may have been rejected, they care about the apps they can use.