BT headphone battery life is better, but it won’t last for a 13 hour plane ride. Beats won’t play passively but I’m sure the next gen of Beats headphones will ship with a cable that is direct to lightning. Other makers will be able to do the same which will effectively be a hug BOM increase, now they will have to ship the headphone with 2 cables AND have to pay a fee to Apple for use of the proprietary connector. It will be interesting. With this amount of market share you can do these things.
Having lived through this a bit with the 30pin switch over (we were fortunate to dodge a few expensive bullets there) and then again with headphones (even without lightening, connection options at the high end are more complicated, for e.x. we ship with the ability to go straight to 3.5, but also support a fully digital connection via USC for higher DAC quality … AND BT… the BOM cost just goes up and up! Dong get me started on the amount of cables we ship for gaming headsets!)
The intermediate definitely means more complication for the user and the manufacturer… but I think it is going somewhere. The journey is always a bit messy.