Now that we've totally lost the war to reserve the word "hack" for what hard-core coders do only (tinkering with their devices and making software run), and not what blackhat infiltrators do, (accessing systems illicitly), I guess it was only a matter of time before someone started using "crack" wrong too.

Certainly the use of DRM violated GPLv3. Does it also violate GPLv2? Which clause?

The App Store TOS have changed many times since the FSF posted that, and that particular sentence no longer appears. So what is now the basis for VLC's actions? You can see the current TOS at http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html#SERVICE It does contain clauses about "you may only use this app on a device you own" etc, which would appear to be against GPL. But it also says the App Store license only applies if the app doesn't have its own EULA. Seems to me (though IANAL) that in the case of a GPL app, that would be the EULA, and would hold instead of Apple's terms. Seems to me that VLC's actions were more about publicity and general offense about Apple's DRM than any actual claims that the GPL was violated. Though surely if they'd used GPL3 then they'd have a basis for such a claim.

Back when the iPhone first came out, and people were shrieking for native development, Steve Jobs announced his "sweet spot", which was the ability to write web apps for the thing (??). To support this position, Apple posted on their development site guidelines on best practices for modern web apps. These guidelines specifically advise against using browser sniffing (except under certain rare conditions which are not met here). One should instead use object detection.

Here are those guidelines. The document lists at length all the reasons not to engage in browser sniffing which are rehashed here. Basically there may be low or no correlation between the information in the user agent string and the browser's abilities. For example all browsers claim to be Mozilla, but it doesn't mean they all have the same feature set as Mozilla's Firefox.

Apple's developers who wrote this gallery appear not to have read this document, or more generally to understand the purpose of web standards at all. Apple's new HTML5 gallery touts standards, but it flouts all the goals of standards. The point of standards is that we can target a standard, rather than a browser. Apple violates the entire purpose, and deserves censure for this hypocrisy.