This sounds reasonable. I know the current trend this month is to hate on GoDaddy because of it being Reddits cause of the week regarding SOPA, but in reality a large company such as this can't prevent this type of infringement due to it's customers acting in bad faith in an automated fashion. To enforce this programatically I think would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, hence why SOPA is a terrible bill. :)
As always with Godaddy, you need to take a look at the bigger picture.
A couple of years ago, a lot of domain tasting was going on. If you registered a domain, you could "return" it within 7 days and get your money back. Bad people abused this to "taste" how many visitors they would get, returning the domain on the very last second. Sometimes they even registered and then returned the domain multiple times in a row.
Bob Parsons, then CEO of Godaddy, was very outspoken against this practice (after all, it made no money for domain registrars like him and occupied domains that he could sell to his customers). Don't get me wrong, domain tasting sucked, but it sucked especially for domain registrars. Thankfully a change in registration rules has since stopped domain tasting.
Which is good for Godaddy, which is now one of the leading "domain parking" and "domain aftermarket" registrars. Which means in layman's terms that they are holding domains ransom for advertising revenue and on the chance that they can squeeze a lot of money from whoever wants the domain. If you let a Godaddy domain expire, chances are that they, knowing how much traffic it brought to you, will renew it for themselves, slap ads on it and wait for some poor schmuck to pay hundreds of dollars to get that domain.
So, to sum it up. Godaddy didn't like people squatting domains when there was no money in it for them, but now they like it a lot because they get a lot of money from it. You may think it is reasonable to not be liable for hosted domains. In my opinion, Godaddy systematically caters to domain squatters, and this should be punished. It's the same for spammers. You can't blame a webhost if a spammer abuses his service, but a webhost that almost exclusively caters to spammers must be stopped.
I thought I've heard of other registrars in the past basically doing something similar, where they log your typo'd domain name due to their DNS redirect and register the domain proactively in order to squat up and coming trends. Surely GoDaddy isn't the only offender in this type of squatting? Not that they should get a pass, but it seems like a problem with shady registrars overall.
