"Particularly Offensive to the Precepts of D&D"

After writing my post on double damage and "instant death,"  I started looking into the history of critical hits in roleplaying games. In doing so, I came across an installment of Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column in issue #16 of Dragon (July 1978). Among many other topics, Gygax touches on the topic of critical hits. This is, I believe, the first time he specifically addresses the topic in print (though I'm prepared to be corrected, if I've overlooked an earlier text on the subject).

Purely from a historical point of view, Gygax's position strikes me as odd. Firstly, there's the matter of Empire of the Petal Throne, published by TSR in 1975. EPT includes critical hits, the first published roleplaying game to do so, and yet I can find no evidence that Gygax was particularly exercised about the inclusion of this mechanical innovation. I suppose it's possible that his opinion on the matter changed. After all, the section about appeared in 1978, which is more than enough time for him to have decided, on reflection, that critical hits were a problem.
Alternatively, it's possible that Gygax's condemnation of critical hits was a narrow one. He calls them "particularly offensive to the precepts of D&D," not "to the precepts of roleplaying games." He may simply have felt that Dungeons & Dragons was designed with a particular type of experience in mind and that critical hits ran counter to that design. Thus, the presence of critical hits in EPT was of no concern to him, since his opinion was solely concerned with D&D. 
However, if that's the case, we have to reckon with the existence of the sword of sharpness and vorpal blade, two magical weapons introduced in Supplement I: Greyhawk in 1975, the same year as Empire of the Petal Throne was published. These weapons include the possibility of instant death by the severing of an opponent's neck and the possibility of this happening is much greater than that of an instant death critical hit in EPT or even the more traditional "double damage on the roll of a natural 20" favored by most versions of the rule in wider circulation. No doubt Gygax would (reasonably) say that these weapons are rare and their inclusion is entirely up to the individual referee. Still, I think there's more than a little mechanical similarity between the way these weapons work and critical hits and that somewhat undercuts Gygax's stated position.
From a purely personal perspective, I can't quite recall when I first encountered the concept of critical hits, but I suspect it was quite early in my introduction to the hobby. By the early '80s, critical hits were one of those rules that everyone knew about and many used, even without being able to point to a section of D&D's actual rules that supported them. For many years, I carried around a photocopy of the critical hit tables from issue #39 (July 1980) and occasionally made use of them. I've never had any really strong feelings for or against the concept, which is why I find Gygax's vehement denunciation of them so odd.