A fellow indie developer posted a blog post defending patches over on his blog Rampant Coyote.  He does a pretty good job of stating that patches are a good thing.

All of the people that complain about developers releasing patches for their games really need to realize one thing.  Patches are a tool and like most tools they aren't inherently good or bad.  It depends on how you use them.

The reason that a lot of people don't like patches is because some companies have shipped buggy crap too early in the past and used patches to fix the mess.  This is a bad practice for the long term.  In the short term, you will ship on time, hit your marketing window, and might make a lot of initial sales.  However, in the long run I think this attitude will eventually catch up to you.

There are plenty of responsible, good ways to use patches though.  Some companies test well, release stable products, but still choose to release patches.  Why?  Because you can smooth out some of the rough edges that you didn't know you had, you can fix the small bugs that only hundreds or thousands of players can find, but more importantly you can see exactly how your actual gamers are playing the game and adjust the game to fit exactly what they want.  You can add more content, you can make moding the game easier, you can balance the gameplay to suit your specific audience better, and there are many other things that you can do to support your community.

Unfortunately, we've seen too many companies abuse patches so they have gotten a bad rap.

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