Would open source have been way slower to catch up if not for the gouging? If not, then it seems very likely that the "gouging" maximized shareholder value by extracting maximum profits during the period in which they were the sole supplier of a valuable-to-you service. You get (during the period in which they are the only supplier) usage of a product that no one else in the entire world is supplying and they get a few extra bucks. Hard for me to get outraged.
There's also something called "killing the golden goose." If they had more reasonable pricing, they may have been able to extract money from more clients for a longer period. I'm not sure what they current profits look like, but gouging your customers for short term gain while destroying long term profits isn't generally considered a good way to maximize shareholder value.
The other scenario is that keeping prices reasonable means there isn't as much demand for an open source version. Developers who balked at paying $150 a seat wouldn't be sufficiently motivated if the cost was a more "reasonable" $20 say.
I just remembered a pretty good example of this with the story of BitKeeper and Git, you can read http://kerneltrap.org/node/4966 for more information. It was the catalyst of losing the cheap enough/free option that motivated the work on Git.
