The _escaped_fragment_ URL is what is crawled by Google as per [0] and the redirect ensures that PAGE gets recorded in Google as /PAGE. Then they also do this:
http://.../PAGE -> http://.../#!/PAGE
but only for logged in users and, I would assume, NOT for requests that have _escaped_fragment_ in the Referer (sic). This ensures that regular URLs work as expected, including those picked up by the users from Google.
[0] http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.h...