That is an interesting take on it and compares to well to the aims that 4E has: Bringing in more beginners, more fresh blood, and that is a good strategy, due to today's realities:
1) D&D, in any incarnation, cannot hold a candle to the White Wolf games if we get to immersive role-playing, these games often fit highly character-driven games better.
2) D&D is a pre-Forge game - love'em or hate'em, but Forge games have interesting concepts and hence also draw more specialised role-players to them.
3) A part of its niche, tactical group-gaming, is partially shared with traditional wargames and newer online games.
4) D&D is a brand and has high brand-loyalty and keeps gamers that way.
5) People have less and less time for casual activities nowadays, seriously.
So, by making the game more casual, D&D admits that it isn't one of the more specialised games - instead it utilizes the latter two aspect - keeping players via brand loyalty and making it more appealing to a casual role-playing crowd.
Because, at least I see it that way, D&D started out as very casual game - heck, it was basically Gygax and Arneson's pamphlet of modded wargaming rules!
By embracing it's casualness and cribbing intuitive concepts from other RPGs (a dash of narrative sprinkling), they made a very good entry-level game - and that's the point:
Not everybody wants to leave entry-level and entry stuff is also often associated with good memories - hence 4E could do for later editions what the original D&D sets (casual, fun games) did for modern editions: Nostalgia.
Sounds like a viable strategy and I suspect that similar considerations were behind it, considering that:
1) WotC tried to launch Gleemax.
2) WotC restructures MtG ight now.
Which both show that WotC tries to tap into that market of latent gamers that don't have the time for more invested gaming, hence also the layout of the 4E books: Non-textbook like, more like a "guide to gaming".
Cheers, LT.