That's just keyboard elitism. You wouldn't be so bothered by them if they had a proper shift-key/fn-key press. Maybe you should step outside of your ASCII bubble an realize there's a whole world of Unicode to explore that can't be encompassed by a double key-stroke.
The degree symbol is what drew me to the brand in the first place. It made it sound clever and novel. They might not need it anymore but I think it helped them become popular.