Remember when phones were just phones. "All I want to do is make bloody calls!" And suddenly Apple went to being the company with the biggest market cap in the world (not any more) in a period of just over 5 years.
Multimedia features outside of those 100% natural to the base device are the big win story of recent times and any hardware producer would be an idiot to ignore that. These are features that aren't for everyone but like the PS3's blu-ray player they make the hardware amazing value for money (& helps toward consolidation of devices) for those interested in those features. And value for money is still key, otherwise every serious gamer would already have a top gaming pc and would be buying all consoles, no decision to make. In the UK I can watch all Sky channels through my XBox and a family subscription in a different house saving myself more than the full price of the XBox every year. No brainer even if I never intended to play a single game.
If you don't/won't have cable then it's not meant to mean **** to you. Same as if you're not into driving games and the next Forza is the best game of all time it won't mean **** to you.