I have one guy saying it’s a bug another saying it’s a feature. We’ll have to wait and see which is accurate.
You'll wait a LONG time. Here's my take. Either it was intentional on Apple's design team's part, or it was unintentional.
** If it was intentional, then it was a "poorly implemented feature". Probably they wanted to have the device maintain the last-set-state by the user, and they decided to do so across a power-cycle. There's a possible justification, but I consider it weak. I would vote to have the device lock itself on power-cycle. So did Apple -- since they changed the behavior in 4.0.
** If it was unintentional -- that is, they intended to have it lock across a power-cycle, and failed to code that behavior correctly -- then it is a "bug". If so, then they corrected it in 4.0.
I doubt strongly that Apple would go out of their way to say what their design team was thinking. Instead, they simply changed the behavior. That change, by itself, does not indicate anything about their original intention, but it does say that they agree that it wasn't good the way it was.
Therefore, since Apple's code is proprietary, not open source, we won't ever learn whether it was a bug or a poorly implemented feature.
In my humble opinion, the issue is closed. My thanks to Puget for posting the thread, since it was fairly interesting and made for some lively discussion.