And we have a Winner

In my defense, I still think this is a bug, but I'm a little ashamed at how obvious the workaround is, especially considering how much time I spent on this today. I was attacking the symptom and not the cause.

Anyway, in the comments of my previous post, Gavin informed me that just manually setting this:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarOrientation:UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight animated:NO];

causes the problem to go away. Thanks Gavin!