Full marks for the commenter who wrote:<p>"I would love to get a 'rejection' letter from Nature that says that they would publish my paper with a delay of a few weeks."<p>The context there is that these days, it takes months and months for a paper to be published in any journal!
It was very nice of them to send his submission back to him with the understanding he may wish to submit it to competing journals. In my opinion, this doesn't paint Nature in any bad light other than being overloaded at the then current time.