Marco Arment, developer of Instapaper, has written an insightful piece discussing Apple, their app approval process, and the relationship they have with developers:

Three parties are involved: the developers (us), Apple, and the customers. For the most part, Apple stands between us and our customers, so the interaction there is limited: we can’t issue refunds, we can only issue a few promo copies, we can’t collect upgrade revenue, we can’t respond to App Store reviews, we can’t provide installation support, and we can’t release updates to address customers’ issues in a reasonable amount of time. We can’t even tell them when the next update will be available, because we honestly don’t know. Our customers, like us, are mostly in the dark with this process, and we can’t do much to help them.

It’s not the process of app submission itself that’s to blame; it’s the utter lack of transparency and guidance on Apple’s part that is truly astounding.

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