I strongly dislike this direction of Apple's design, seen also in the new MacBooks. You ask, "What is the point of doing away with all of the ports and support electronics if you need an big, ugly, cumbersome adapter to make the device useful again?" and in response hear judgmental sneers that you aren't their target customer anymore, you power user.
But I guess that's par for course for the consumers that clad their fantastically stylish sci-fi pocket supercomputer marvels of manufacturing in neon Croc-rubber.
Why include things that take up space, weight, and cost, things which most users won't use, when users seem to most want less space, weight, and cost?
Users have gone wireless on nearly everything else, and are about to buy more wireless headphones than wired. The dongle is just an interim fix until you switch other devices to matching wireless; we've done it many times before, and we'll do it again.
Users that want the thinnest phone possible so they can wrap it in a Fisher Price box.
Users that want cheaper phones so they can pump more money into the accessory ecosystem the functionality back.
You have fun charging 2 or 3 things every few hours and having horrible device interop or none at all with your headphones and other accessories. I'll keep my headphones.
But I guess that's par for course for the consumers that clad their fantastically stylish sci-fi pocket supercomputer marvels of manufacturing in neon Croc-rubber.