But is there a way of making this work with regular bluetooth headphones? AFAIK whey you pair them, the HP will remember the device's physical address, so the random apple devices you may have would have to present the same address to the headphones. Hell, this doesn't work on its own, even between a Linux and Windows install on the same PC. You have to manually move some connection information between the two to get e.g. a mouse working in both.

So if Apple figured a way of bypassing this limitation, it's really not clear to me why that should be considered "bad", even if it's clearly better than what the competition does. It's on the bluetooth standard to do better.

Or is your point that apple should have standardized the protocol they use to make this happen?