This is true, and they also gave away their first laser mouse if I recall. What's nice about WWDC is that its cost tends to act as a fairly decent bozo filter.

The cost of the conference is relative. There's a lot of international attendees and for them the price is more than the freebies.

What I have seen with higher price conference is that you get a lot of corporate attendees and more lower to middle management than developers. It may have been also because of the conference too (oracle, webmethods and Microsoft)