LOL. Could be true, I don't know. But the way the N9 and N900 handle these SMS messages is really bad from a user point of view: totally disregarding the entire message.
And it is supported by a lot of other phones (at least partially) and a number of web-sms-services, so it isn't just Apple (but in real live I only experienced it from iPhone users.)

You could make a comparison to web-browsers and web pages: Would you want a browser to simply not display anything at all when it can't display the page correctly because of non-standard code?
If Firefox or Chrome would have done that, far fewer people would have started using them.

I currently need to whine to my iPhone-using-friends not to use these icons (and I do).