They settled without admitting any wrongdoing of course, but what they "got caught doing" was simply not disclosing what was happening -- and that's the only thing they changed afterward.

It was still the correct course of action, and obviously not done maliciously -- a phone that was so slow it was annoying to use, and a phone that reboots 10x a day are equally 'incentive' to buy a new phone, so I fail to see how the throttling benefited Apple one bit.

In fact, I'd say the unreliable rebooting one would have provided stronger incentive to replace it vs. a slow one.