I used to rag on the whole "patches on release day" thing, but you have to compare that to the idea that getting a "final" build through 1st parties like Microsoft and Sony is a long process that can go for weeks (or much longer, if you're actually doing a physical disc). If you wait until you have an actually final gold master version of the game, you then have developers working on "Day 1 DLC" (which gets quite a lot of flak as it is), or sitting on their hands. So what you actually do is ship your version 0.98 with the bugs that you expect to be able to fix within your window, start both the process for submitting the game and the process for submitting a patch, and hope that you allocated your development time properly.
Needless to say, this comes back and bites a lot of people in the ass, but for a lot of small game studios a 2-6 week delay in a game ship can be the difference between solvency and firing everyone in the office.
*Needless to say, this is probably a completely inappropriate workflow for someone like EA/Maxis, who probably had some suits that said said "well, other people do it, so we should do it too".
It makes perfect sense for there to be a patch on release day. There is a non-trivial amount of time between the completion of a game and when the discs are pressed, packaged and shipped to retailers in preparation for a release. There are bound to be both discoveries and opportunities to fix them during that period.
That said, it's absolutely absurd to ship a game with universal bugs affecting core mechanics.
I don't really see a problem with releasing patches on release day. If you need some lead time to get all your DVDs pressed and manuals printed and whatever, why not take advantage of that time to also polish the game in parallel?
However, going any further is just not right. If the game is hopelessly buggy after release and needs to be patched later just to make it playable, well, what are people paying for?
This is becoming quite common with games, on PC or consoles. You just patch it later. Some games even have patches available on release day.