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"I think everyone's reading too much into this. This is wholly about covering Apple's arse, and little else."

This is almost a contradictory statement. Apple are responsible in different ways to their shareholders, their customers and their government. All three. There is often, in different ways, a tension between all three, with each party having different requirements, but on this topic the tension is mostly between government and customer/citizen with both pulling in different directions. The government wants more access to private data, the citizen, in the main, wants the government to have less. Tech companies running cloud services, Apple included, have been left in the middle in no man's land, unfairly left to resolve what is essentially a government/political issue because politicians and political apparatchiks have abdicated on their responsibility to ensure their policy is an acceptable one by the people. If Apple are indeed motivated purely to cover their own arse (I'm always wary of the reasoning of anyone who talks in absolute terms about other's motivation - as it seems to me you are then the kind of person who is prepared to tell me what I am thinking, when clearly you can have no absolute knowledge of such), the precise way to do that is to, put up a canary, treat it properly as a canary and publish a white paper detailing every aspect of their security systems and how they are implemented so the world knows what measures they are taking and how they are implementing them. It may surprise you to know that Apple, who have always been an extremely secretive company, have recently publish a detailed and comprehensive white paper covering all aspects of how they have implemented security.

No people are not reading too much into it.