Yea, I agree that his blogpost was more colorful, but his emails to the company seemed totally fine. He's basically just asking them for more or less a favor that they are not obliged to honor (like you pointed out), but is all this really worth the bad PR?

The part that really bothers me is that one of the reasons they give for denying him this is a recent engineering mistake. It just feels like this is all out of spite, and it's more of a childish move more than anything.