I think the biggest issue people have with the arctic wolf is that they think it's just a clone of the timber wolf (which I'm going to refer to as 'northwestern wolf' here for the sake of argument) while said wolf should have a white skin variant to begin with. I think most people don't realize there are more differences between the arctic wolf and the northwestern wolf than colour, biome and name alone. The arctic wolf is overall smaller, has a shorter snout and legs, smaller ears and (if I recall correctly) are relatively heavier. They also tend to have more black skin surrounding the eyes. White northwestern wolves aren't actually white either but more blonde/creamy. Another problem in noticing the difference between these two wolves is that in captivity they are allowed to interbreed so the traits that make them more unique become harder to distinguish (though they are already challenging to tell apart and I'm sure interbreeding happens in the wild as well). Added onto that, northwestern wolves lose a lot of pigment as they age so wolves with a creamy fur can become completely white. It doesn't help most images we see on the internet are of captive "arctic" wolves, either.
We could argue that these small differences aren't worth the money and we'd rather see a competely new animal added, and I agree with that though I do like the idea of having arctics. I certainly hope we will get arctic wolves that resemble their wild counterparts more but if I have to be honest, I don't have very high hopes. I would have preferred to see arabian wolves or african golden wolves (even though we have a lot of african animals as it is) added as subspecies instead because they look noticeably different, and have the "timber" wolf receive the black, white and other colour variants it should have.