That's fair, I guess they don't really want to force people to have a cell the size of a car battery strapped to their head to listen to music, but it does seem a bit strange to me that a company that prides itself on integrating all their devices to all their other devices didn't see this as a bad PR move.

EDIT:

Added a "don't" to the first sentence.

I once had an old iPod with 128kbps MP3 copies of my FLAC library. I reencoded everything as 256kbps AAC audio (double the bitrate) and noticed the battery life went way up. Turns out those devices had better hardware decoding for AAC.