The punishment is about the same for all websites that engage in blackhat SEO. At least, once they clean up their acts. Until they clean up their acts, the punishment remains in effect. This can be difficult when you pay for nebulous backlinks from spam sites in a network, for instance, as played out with the Anglo Links takedown Google did last month:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319130/Did-Anglo-Rank-...Mind you, this is not the exact behavior RapGenius engaged in. They paid for backlinks, but they paid legitimate sites directly for links in blog posts. Either way, though, it's still blackhat.
It's a really interesting world if you feel like reading up on it at some point. I've always done basic SEO (read: real, legitimate, basic stuff that I'd never even advertise as 'whitehat SEO' since that nearly always means 'blackhat' but we'll pretend it isn't) for my personal sites and client sites over the years. But you're going up against these 'players' who routinely setup networks of spam link sites, backlink payment networks, etc. Granted, most of those are pump and dump. They build them up, make their money, get penalized, then burn it to the ground and move on to another domain. Still, it can be disheartening. And it may tempt some people to take the blackhat approach. But, one look at the penalties should be enough to change their minds.