I completely agree. It looks like a nice hack that can help you ship in time. Let's say testing shows a few older apps that have drivers that really misbehave on the new system, and you really want to ship this week. To me, adding those apps to a fixed "do not run" list seems to be preferred over shipping later or shipping an OS that will crash with a large portion of your users. That is especially true if those apps have free or cheap updates.
Conspiracy theorists: for Apple, this technique dates back to at least the eighties or so. At some time, Apple introduced a system error "Application has special memory requirements" that basically meant "Sorry, we cannot run Excel 2.2" (text and version may be of). Reason was that that Excel used some bits in pointers for data storage. The new OS or hardware started using those bits itself, so that version of Excel could not run on with it. So, the Finder refused to run that program.
Conspiracy theorists: for Apple, this technique dates back to at least the eighties or so. At some time, Apple introduced a system error "Application has special memory requirements" that basically meant "Sorry, we cannot run Excel 2.2" (text and version may be of). Reason was that that Excel used some bits in pointers for data storage. The new OS or hardware started using those bits itself, so that version of Excel could not run on with it. So, the Finder refused to run that program.