What kind of blockage did you set up? A hijacking 404/403 HTTP response, or are you dropping IP packets to the www.apple.com IP addresses? If your router blocking is implemented on the HTTP level, then obviously you would see the same result as everyone just did when that URL returned 404.

I'd be more interested in learning how iOS reacts when TCP (HTTP) connections to that URL time out, or are treated as a closed port.

I just went to the parental access control section on the router (a free router the ISP gave me) and set apple.com to block.

I guess if you're a large corporate and you don't want iPads/iPhones using your wifi, this is an absolutely great way to block them with zero effort!

I love a good reason to be upset but I sympathize with this bug. It should be easy to get around the captive portal issue and they should have other contact domains besides apple.com (in fact, that's the most offensive part of this), but it's an admirable task. Imagine if you connect to the Wifi and it didn't do this... you'd have no idea why you're not receiving any of your data.

For what it's worth, recent copies of Android try to help you through the captive portal process as well, though I doubt they fail if android/google.com go down. (Though, Android has always had an indicator, they only become colored after Gapps makes a good connection to Google)