Apple's endgame is saving face and customer trust. Just last year they were touting customer controlled security and privacy. This year the FBI wants them to help access a phone and what do you, they actually can! Oops. Failure on Apple's part which I'll come back to. Now, it sounds to me like Apple is just going to disable the auto-erase on pin failure and retry timeout, but not many people will understand that.

The FBI's endgame is requiring companies to build backdoors into their devices. Once they are able to successfully compel a company such as Apple to help them break into the phone, they are very close to compelling congress to pass laws to require that the option be available in the first place. "Hey, the court told them to do it before so why should they be allowed to block future need?". Here is where Apple's screw up comes into play. After all this they could shore up the security gaps to further remove themselves from the equation, but after a successful court order the FBI will move to block them from making an even more secure device.