Agreed about the policy, but what's that about HN being slow? It's loads incredibly fast for me, much faster than other news aggregators (Reddit, etc.)
Apple's going to annoy a lot of big developers with this. Who's going to use Game Center, when a lot of big games are written with the help of Unity, etc.? There are so many top-10 games affected by this.
Even THQ's Star Wars: Trench Run is affected. You can't really get more high profile than that. I wrote a blog post (http://bit.ly/disQ2C) with some links to various SDKs and their app showcases to give people a bit of an idea of just how many existing apps this SDK change will effect.
How about the Corona SDK (http://anscamobile.com)? They use Lua, but they claim they're allowed by the pre-4.0 SDK. I don't know how it works behind the scene, but I think they were allowed because the SDK didn't allow you to load code on runtime (e.g. think about a C64 emulator), but as long as the code was fixed it's fine. It can't execute arbitrary code because the app signing process ensures that the only code that runs is the same code submitted to Apple.
In regards to his criticism of syncing, I think it seems like such an obviously missing feature that Apple has to do something about it, namely opening up MobileMe/iWork.com for free (ad-supported) to offer proper competition to Google.