Part of the reason why there is some backlash against this announcement isn't so much against that it's going to be late, but that the monthly fee was a complete surprise.
It's totally normal (and encouraged!) to have premium features, but the shipping delayed announcement went like this:
* Hey peoples are really excited about wakemate! * We've made some breakthroughs in the development of wakemate that makes it more awesome than before (yay!) * Because we've been making it better it's going to be delayed, and we're going to compensate the delay by giving you free access to the premium analytics features. (Wait, what? What premium analytics features?)
I think this announcement would have been received better if the premium features had been mentioned in the same paragraph announcing all the breakthroughs. The premium feature could have been presented as benefit of these breakthroughs (with the increased feature set, we can now charge for value), but because it was first mentioned as part of compensation of the delayed release, it comes across as negative.