Well, you see it's a tricky one. First of all, it wasn't a hack. It's basically walking up to a person, telling them you're an Apple employee and asking them for the username and password. Would you provide all that information of someone did that on the street just randomly? No. You'd find that weird, and asked them to leave you alone or call the police. So why do people feel more comfortable giving out these details over email? Beats me...
Then there's the issue of nude pictures and videos. The way I see it, the number one rule to our digital lives is not taking nude pictures and videos of ourselves. Why? Because they WILL get leaked one way or another. Even involuntarily. Have you ever bought a used hard drive and tried data recovery software on it? The amount of stuff that you would find, would blow your mind. I think if someone is really worried about their privacy, they'll educate themselves and interact accordingly with their digital devices.
Finally there's Apple. Apple boast about privacy and security of your data and here comes a young lad and gets the stuff just by asking for it. I mean come on, we can do better than that, and it's this scandal that made it happen, so I'd say Apple bears some of the fault in being reactive to security measures rather than proactive.
I really believe the punishment fits the crime, but only because it needs to set an example that doing these kinds of things while incredibly easy to do, is simply not cool. Punishing them with something along the lines of 8 years would be excessive simply because there are much more serious crimes that get punished with less than that.
As to what you were saying about "potentially running their personal and professional lives, I'd argue that's not the case. The nudes were not about children - in which case this would have been a whole different discussion - but grown-ass adults, many of whom appear naked on TV for the right price. If anything, it boosted their celebrity status.