Nothing is personal to Mr Pearson (though I'm not crazy that he verbally abused a female community member at a conference yesterday) it's merely consistent with Automattic's policy of not promoting businesses from the directory that break the law.
I also want to correct the notion that it's about charging or giving things away for free: Woothemes, StudioPress, iThemes, and many others make many millions of dollars charging for their products, none of which violate WordPress' license. In fact, the overwhelming majority of WordPress-based businesses have no problems with the license. Tens of thousands of new businesses every year are prospering on top of the community-built platform of WordPress. I love what premium themes, a market led by Brian Gardner, Adii Pienaar, and Cory Miller, have done for the WordPress world.
Regardless of whether you care about the listing or not, I hope you consider the ethics and morality of the situation. Mr Pearson ignores the licensing of the platform he profits off of because he feels that respecting it will make him less money, or even worse allow someone to profit off his work. (The horror! Disrespect of license is not inconsistent with his previous experience of selling counterfeit handbags.) If he has an ideological problem with the GPL, there are many other platforms such as EE that don't restrict the restrictions he can place on his customers.
WordPress is over 200,000 lines of code written over 8 years and thousands of contributors explicitly licensed so you can profit off their work. You may think that nobody cares, but already some of the more prominent Thesis users such as Laughing Squid are starting to switch away.
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