Maybe for some couch potatoes and geeks who spend all their time hunched over their PCs this is okay, but Apple at least understands their demographic: people who download music and take it with them. In the car, on the airplane, running in the park, mowing the lawn. It is a total fallacy that people are "connected" all the time. The closest thing that comes to this is the smartphone that averages from a few bytes per second throughput for text messages to a few KB per second for voice calls and emails. Data rates and volumes above these numbers start to get expensive very fast. Compare this to the $2-$3 per GB cost of local flash storage and $.07 per GB for disk storage.
"Music execs" are of course excited about non-local music content, because it means higher revenues and less chance of copying, which is better for THEM. Don't try to dress it up as some nebulous benefit for the consumer.
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