I just checked and all of the computers and devices I own for work have AES hardware in them (Mac Mini, Macbook Air, iPhone). Maybe NIST thinks that, through standardization efforts, they can encourage more people to integrate such hardware over the long term?

The amount of hardware support that AES has already is pretty substantial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

I'd rather not suppose there's something insidious going on here, just that maybe NIST is taking a longer-term view than racing to put AES and SHA3 in everything yesterday.