From the sound of it Pepsi was entirely responsible for the campaign, not Apple, so you can't exactly blame Apple whether it's good or bad. I don't know whether Apple had any approval rights or not, so they may or may not be responsible for some of the blame if the ads suck. Personally, I like the concept, but I'm not sure whether it'll work on a large scale or not.
And as for the iTMS being "the man", that's really not fair in a number of ways. In a perfect world, you'd be able to either buy CDs and rip them freely without any hairy gorilla breathing down your neck or slapping copy protections on the CD, or buy unprotected digital copies of music on the internet.
The world's not perfect. The "get something for nothing" attitude of net folk is mildly annoying to me, but it was largely a response to a need--people wanted easily available digital music, and the RIAA was not making it readily available to them, because they were so attached to the overpriced physical media and its distribution channels. People want inexpensive downloads. Don't give them an option, and they'll go elsewhere.
Which brings us to the iTMS. Assuming you want to create an online music store at this point in time, and you want to be as fair as possible to your consumers, you have two choices:
a) Sell only music from indie or forward thinking bands that are willing to accept unprotected music.
or
b) Make the RIAA happy with your copy protection scheme.
In the case of (a), some small online stores do this, but your selection is going to be exceedingly limited for as long as the current studio system persists, which may be a long, long time. In the case of (b), you have restrictions, but a wide variety of popular music. Apple chose (b), because that's what people want.
And, by all accounts, they fought tooth and nail to get the relatively leinent (in comparison to other alternatives) licencing agreement we enjoy today, further opening up the same less restrictive terms to others. I'd bet money if Steve could've gotten a deal for unprotected files he would have, but that just isn't going to happen in the real world.
Don't forget, after all, that Apple uses no product activation or other copy protection schemes with its own software.
They're the good guys on this one, they're just doing it subtly.
Keep in mind that iTMS also has quite reasonable licencing terms for indies--certainly better than what big record labels give bands.
