The second point is something that Apple has, contrary to their normal secretive manners, done really well. As soon as it became obvious that the outages were becoming a major issue, a status page was opened with near-daily updates.

From my own experience this is the main point in customer support and loyalty; people are always willing to accept problems because anyone can make a mistake, be it a billing error or a server that goes down unexpectedly. As long as you are honest about what the problem is, and can give them an estimate of how long the problem is going to take to resolve, they tend to forgive problems soon.