Right, so an admin tarballing the content of a user's folder is an idiot because he didn't check to make sure the shell he was using wouldn't pass any of the file names as executable attributes instead of, you know, file names?
The one line summary for this story is bad things happen to people who use a command without knowing what the command does.
The definition of the unix wildcard when used in the shell is:
"The character * is a wildcard and matches zero or more character(s) in a file (or directory) name."
Note that the definition doesn't include anything about translate filenames into other kinds of executable parameters.