I find the Beats-bashing to be very suspect.
It's funny how a hobby (hi-fi, audiophile, whatever you want to call it) dominated by white men just happens to get so incensed over something marketed by and to the urban crowd.
Why aren't we angry about every other thing that's endorsed by celebrities? Why this one in particular? I don't think the folks behind Activia yogurt "played everybody for a fool" or "had us over a barrel from the beginning" because they hired Jamie Lee Curtie as a spokesperson. They certainly didn't spend their budget on inventing a better tasting yogurt or one with different cultures in it, that's for sure.
"Sound quality" is not a great reason to pick on Beats. Most headphones and speakers (under $1000 or so) aren't even trying to sound neutral; they're intentionally boosting certain frequencies and suppressing others. Beats headphones are obviously massively boosting the bass, but this isn't any less "accurate" than, say, your average Grado headphones and many enthusiasts (myself included) really enjoy those things.
Marco Arment had the perfect analogy, I think.
"Beats did to headphones what Starbucks did to coffee:
while they’re not the best, they’re a huge upgrade from
what most people were using before, and they’ve
dramatically increased the market and mainstream
acceptability of spending $200–400 on full-sized
headphones and wearing them in public."
While the changes brought by Beats and Starbucks haven't been entirely positive, even if you don't like them, they've definitely expanded the market. The net effect of Beats is that there are TONS of great headphones on the market now, more than there were ten years ago. For a guy like me who's a fan of that stuff that's good news even though I'm not a Beats customer.