No, I think it's predicated on the assumption that user data is very valuable --- to the companies that inevitably try to mine and monetise it --- that freedom should be taken away from the users and the platform should provide developers with as much control over the users' data as possible. It's an ongoing movement to lock down devices against the user; to turn general-purpose computers into restricted environments for consumption and very little creation. No doubt the media companies' DRM interests are partially responsible for this.

Even the concept of a file as an application-neutral container for data is being slowly obfuscated away by this movement, as users are gradually conditioned to open apps first, and then open their data from them. I think one of my biggest surprises upon using an Android smartphone for the first time was discovering that it didn't even have a rudimentary text editor by default (something that I was accustomed to on every other OS), nor could the standard file manager view text files although it could view movies, pictures, and music. As I understand it, the iOS situation is even more restricted than that, with not even a file manager provided as part of the OS.

As another datapoint, I've encountered quite a few beginning computer science students who didn't really know what a file is, and were quite amazed that multiple applications could work with the same files.