I'm a bit skeptical as well. The alternatives to giving up seem too obvious. Perhaps they didn't crunch the numbers right and were going to take a bath on the building them. Assuming its really just a problem they had with Apple, I don't see why they didn't provide a poll asking their customers what the their preference was (refund or design change). If nothing else, just bundle a lightning cable with the device.

Having a plain USB port or two would be handy anyways as there are still plenty of proprietary USB cables in the wild (GPSes, oddball electronics, older electronics, iPod shuffles).