Robin Hood and Bonny and Clyde are names people remember (albeit probably not for anything they actually did). griefers are just some arse who corpse camped someone for three hours but whose name no one can remember.

No comparison at all.

A griefer is not a rebel. A griefer is not an outlaw. Griefers are in no way romantic. Griefers are in no way sympathetic. They don't have a cause, they don't want to make a point, they don't change the world in any meaningful way. They're just pseudo-functional sociopaths who get off on inflicting harm on others and choose to do so (at least partially) in an environment where the consequences of their actions will be minimal to nonresistant.

At best they're pathetic, at worst disgusting.

In most games there isn't the possibility of being a rebel or outlaw, the relatively tight rulesets and controlled environments just don't allow for it. Games that do (Eve being the only one that comes to mind) tend to be shunned by many exactly because they do. Most people feel if they wanted to be held up at gunpoint they'd move to New York.

Oddly enough, most games do allow griefing, with only minimal effort put into slowing it down. It's a standing joke in WoW that most of the PvP that goes on in PvP servers is level eighties ganking lowbies in Stranglethorn Vale. This is true of most games where PvP is allowed or, especially, encouraged -- people rarely want fair and even fights.