Hey folks, I'm the student writing the emails in the post here. Thanks to everyone for their criticisms. While I was initially kind of shocked by the recruiter's response, I've had a lot of time to think about it today and have realized that I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it…
I see recruitment like a see sales. When you're selling a technical product (e.g. a smartphone) to the general public, it's your job to communicate what makes it great, and it's not the public's fault if they don't understand the technical terms. That doesn't mean that a chunk of the population aren't being idiotic when they misunderstand some bit of your marketing spiel, but it's fundamentally your problem and not theirs.
Another point of view is that recruitment people are going to be less technically savvy than the actual engineers. That's a good thing - do you want to work as an engineer somewhere where they make the engineers do all the HR grunt work?