Maybe he expected a "thanks for showing us this vulnerability, we've pulled your app from the store and are working on a fix to the problem", as a sane response would be.
He could also just have sent them an email about it. Instead he put a malicious app on the store and announced a talk at a security conference. Diplomacy was never his skill.
All kinds of nasty things have slipped through to the users. There have been multiple remote root exploits for iOS in the wild for weeks at a time and nobody really cared. There would be no fallout.
I agree that it's easy to see why they don't take kindly to this sort of thing, but it should also be easy to see why they should take kindly to it.
