If you take away the marketing and phone home aspects of his plugins, it looks like they provide good functionality
The marketing aspect is for supporting the development of the plugin. It's totally optional as I give the option to opt out instantly at any time the user want.

I had two option while developing the pluign. Either make the plugin a paid plugin or find out some other way to support the plugin. I chose the second one. I know lots of people don't have money to pay for the softwares. (I also fall in the same group) If adding an optin form makes the plugin free and people can get advantage of getting free support, bug fixes and updates then what's wrong with that?

Regarding the phone home functions... it was actually a feature added for the user. It costs us more in hosting fee and don't serve any benefit to us. It was developed just for the users convenience.

In the past there was no automatic notification and automatic installtion for the plugins. We custom developed such features for the support of our user. Talk about dedication. At that time no other plugin developer had thought in that way. I think we were the only one who provided such easy features to users.

Later, wordpress built its own wordpress directory and then provided update notification and automatic install to the wordpress users. Those codes are there as it is from the past. Our plugins now gets updated by wordpress repository in the same way as other plugin does.

Also, there's still one more unique feature in our plugins. Our plugin have custom notification bar in our plugin's setting page where we alert the user about important updates. There's still no such feature available in other plugins.