They've literally always been form-over-function. They may have caught this issue and said "those people can disable this completely optional feature".
It’s definitely a bad design especially given the context of existing mice, and a case of poor communication, or insufficient user testing, or even hubris maybe. Your dismissive summary of their intentions is not at all fair, however.
If you carefully held it in a very particular way, you could make it lose a couple bars. Jobs said: there's no reception problem, just don't hold it that way. It turned out he was right.
