The point is that Apple's best interests are served by putting the consumers' interests before the developers'. For some other companies it might be the other way around, but Apple has no lack of people willing to be developers. It can easily afford to alienate some of 'em.

But consumers? There's a lot of people with iOS devices, but are they buying apps? If the top fifty apps on the app store are crap, and people can't find the good apps, they'll buy fewer apps, and that bites into Apple's revenues, unlike alienating a few spam-inclined developers, which doesn't.