As a sibling to your comment says, I have often unashamedly included an "executive summary". They seem to appreciate it. I also rather frequently pull them off the email chain when I'm diving into technical details, unless they explicitly ask to stay up-to-date on the entire chain. Then, if I want to re-update them, I'll add them back in, so they get the whole chain in one shot if they really want to dig and I'm not "hiding" anything, but they still get their summary.
Upshot, don't be scared to put "executive summaries" in. It's not sarcasm and it's not a joke.