Sure, the Apple and U2 promotion of the latter’s album Songs of Innocence could’ve been executed a lot better. The biggest problem were for people with the setting to download new purchases automatically, because the album essentially was a new purchase, albeit free and unintended, and thus it’d dowbload to your device(s). It would’ve been much better to just promote the hell out of a link to the album’s page on iTunes, and just set the price to free. Not as disruptive obviously, but without the backlash and its removal tool.
Still, I think the whole thing got a bit carried away. You got a somewhat decent rock album from one of the biggest bands in the world for free. Not everyone’ll like the music, but it’s not like it cost you anything. Except space if you have automatic downloads enabled (which I don’t, I use iTunes Match and stream instead), and you can always just remove the album from your device(s). It’s a fuckup, but not a big one, and not even remotely serious. There are more important things to worry about.