I think part of the huge outcry was to send a message to EA, and to the fans' credit, it worked. Most people don't have a problem with the idea of online only in general, but when you take a game that has basically been a completely offline affair and now declare that it HAS to be online, people are not going to take it well. Also, the fact that the new Simcity arguably had less features than Simcity 4 made it seem like an unnecessary game. Finally, the fact that Maxis kept saying "Oh, we designed the game to be online all the time to take advantage of cloud computing" was totally debunked when people were able to get the game running for hours in hacked offline modes.
At the end of the day, the online only function was STRICTLY for DRM, which gamers HATE. And yes, while I understand the argument of "99% of the time our PCs are online so who cares?" argument, as King mentioned, if the game HAS to be online, it better be for a reason other than "Because we think all PC gamers are pirating a**holes that would make Jack Sparrow jealous!" We also forget that not everyone has steady internet access, and also it's annoying to know that if you want to say, play a game on your laptop while travelling, it's a little annoying to have to pay the airline for internet access just so you can "check in" your game with the servers and be allowed to play it.
It should also be noted that today also marks the shutting down of the Diablo auction house, which was supposed to be the "reason" why Diablo 3 had to be online only. So basically two of the biggest game companies in the world were told to "Cut the sh*t" by their customer base, and they obliged. I'd say that was a nice win for us gamers. And before people start throwing sales statistics at me to say that the companies won in the end, don't forget that REMOVING these features also cost money, and these companies decided that it was better for business to remove these features than to leave them in.
