Because stealing someone's iPhone off a restaurant table isn't a felony, it's petty theft. You're trivializing what the new iPhone is. It represented millions of dollars of R&D and contained proprietary information so is therefor potentially protected under trade secret laws. There's no functional difference between publicizing the physical phone or it's blueprints: you're competition knows what you're up to (and can't sell yet) and your customers are going to forgo buying your current product.
As I put in the post, "A trade-secret claim based on readily observable material is a bust." IDX Systems Corp. v. Epic Systems Corp., 285 F. 3d 581, 584 (7th Cir. 2002).
The most Gawker revealed was (1) features readily observable on the outside and (2) information printed on the components when the device was opened. Obviously, none that would be considered a "trade secret" once the iPhone was up for sale on the market.
Can a feature list be considered a trade secretly few months before the items released? That's a tough one, particularly because Apple itself released this iPhone into the wild, where it was found by a third party. It's not like Gawker snuck into Apple's campus and found some research for products contemplated way in the future, product so far off that Apple had not yet filed a patent on the technology. (By way of background, the whole purpose of trade secret law is to protect things that a person doesn't want to disclose publicly by patenting. Almost by definition, a trade secret has to be something that was patentable, and so far nothing on the prototype iPhone looks like it was patentable.)
All of which brings us back to the central point: it's debatable if Apple even suffered a legally-cognizable injury by virtue of someone bringing publicity to a device Apple, through its employee, left out in the wild. In light of that, and in light of the serious concerns about journalistic shield, REACT should have shown caution. Instead, they took the most aggressive approach they could have.
I agree that injury may not be big with consumers, but I can imagine scenarios where the leak is damaging with business partners/suppliers/vendors.
For example, if Apple is negotiating pricing for current models and other party was willing to pay more pre-leak because the did not think the next gen would be as large of an upgrade.
