Many times you can't get something without the bells and whistles.
BTW, you can blame the marketing department for that - They're the ones who came up with the product spec; the engineering department just implemented it.
That's my take on the situation. It's an electronic version of Parkinson's Law - the ability to have doo-dads grows with the capacity to handle them. As power and storage expands, the engineers will find more things to add on the device, until you start getting nonsensical - like using a 3 Gig computer to watch a movie..
[Sidebar] Regarding the many-language instructions, I find I get ticked off if they are only in English-Spanish. However, when you get to English-Italian-German-RestOfTheWorld, it's not a biggie. You can also see why English is the lingua-franca of the world, where time is money. All the other languages take up to a third more space to say the same thing. In some cases they sound like an old Sid Cesear routine, where they rattle on in their lingo and then suddenly throw in an English word as they don't have an equivalent.