I understand they mean free as in freedom. I also think that if you exclude the 'fact that ... necessities cost money' from the concept of freedom, you end up with a pretty poor concept. But that's not really the issue at hand here.
The issue is, if you have a 'free' device in a society that is largely based upon the absence of freedom, it's ultimately a fetish - in the magical-thinking sense. And honestly, if we were in a society that was substantially free, the FSF would never have been needed in the first place.
I think you're getting at utilitarianism versus some idea like Kant's categorical imperative.
From an idealistic standpoint, RMS's views are consistent and sensible, honorable even. But from a utilitarian view (which I support incidentally), we evaluate the actual real-world consequences of each decision. In that light, RMS's overall concerns still hold up completely but his emphasis on each person individually rejecting all non-free software uncompromisingly is non-utilitarian.
I guess consequentialist v deonotological would be another way of framing it. That all said, my suspicion is that most people that go hard deontological essentially do so because they care more about their own moral purity than the state of the world.
And, if you want to look at what happens when deonotological ethics are the norm, just look at medieval europe.
The issue is, if you have a 'free' device in a society that is largely based upon the absence of freedom, it's ultimately a fetish - in the magical-thinking sense. And honestly, if we were in a society that was substantially free, the FSF would never have been needed in the first place.