This is my view on this as well. I don't really see Apple opening up into this space unless there's an experience to be had from it. Apple likes to take lackluster experiences that end-users "just deal with" and make them into something excellent. They like to use the word "magical" but I think that's a bit overboard.
Just look at any product in their history - they took music players that were fine but bulky and time-consuming to use and turned them into a single intuitive device that could fit in your pocket, carry your entire library, and sync to the computer without any user intervention. I know a lot of tech people are annoyed with iTunes and want to be able to manually drag and drop the files that they want, but, for the non-tech user, iTunes (which already had all their music organized) would just let them sync their music by plugging in without any intervention at all. Apple may have made an assumption for the masses by assuming everyone's music was organized on the computer they were syncing from (and in iTunes, no less), but, when it worked, it was amazing from an experience standpoint.
That's what these headphones are. Just think about the list of things that suck about headphones in a perfect world - cables and wires suck on anything, wireless is more convenient in every case, pairing bluetooth headphones sucks when they get disconnected, the batteries on wireless headphones suck. These are their answer to those complaints - headphones that last much longer than others with a charger that is also a case that syncs to all your devices and intelligently plays wherever from whatever device you're using. Whether they succeed is another story, but the explanation for this product is there.