Ok, again... U2 want you to spend $150. Blaming Apple is like blaming Walmart or Best Buy because the box set sitting on the shelf offers the exact same issue.
I would point out that if these "40 or so" (or X number, for those others complaining they only want so many of them) tracks were issued as b-sides, 2 per single, it would take many albums to get them out, the single would cost $8-$12 to buy as imports (in the USA) and would end up costing $8*20 = $160 or more.
That might be stretching it a bit, but it's still a great price to have high-quality encoding (all iTunes tracks are, according to Apple, taken directly from the master, not just a simple CD rip) and tons of material. Hell, I paid $30 for the BOOT of the Boston show alone 10 years ago.
Point being, no one is making you buy anything. This is a classic example of fans making U2 the bad guy because people collect these tracks and get them for free via p2p or they buy bootlegs, and now that the band issued them THEY are the bad guys for not thinking, "Gee, what about all the people who got this rare stuff as a bootleg. Let's offer each track invidually. " If this weren't on iTunes, option 2 would be NOTHING since it would take about 30 CDs to release this much stuff. But, since iTunes does sell individual songs, now they're the evil conglomerate looking to, Heaven forbid, turn a profit by selling these tracks as a package that puts them at 34 cents per song.
There's several hundred tracks on that box that are totally new if someone only bought the commercially available material. I, as someone who recently downloaded the 12/31/89 concert from another U2 fansite was delighted to have a professionally mastered copy of an excellent show, and have no problem paying the band for it.
In the end, it sounds like lots of people will trade the tracks anyway, somehow justifying it because they're going to buy a concert ticket or they've bought other rare u2 stuff or whatever.
I think the band did an excellent job of trying to find enough material to make the $150 worthwhile for the newbie U2 fan or the die-hard collector. If they released a 6-disc set of the Boston SHow, the Point Depot show, the rare remixes, the "Rare and Unreleased" stuff, and the early material, I could see that selling for $120. $30 more for high-quality encodings of the current catalog (although not truly the "complete" catalog) seems pretty reasonable to me. I think they had to walk a line between the more casual fan and the die-hard, and they did so quite well. Not flawlessly, but well.