My guess is for distillation, they need to forward the prompt to Anthropic to get the real Anthropic model's response so they can train their own models on it
Improvements in model performance aren't always strictly compute-constrained in a way that makes them reliant on Moore's Law. Open weight models-- in particular, from Chinese labs-- are optimizing model intelligence with less compute. They're "behind" frontier models by months, but as others have noted, it's possible to get Sonnet 4.5+ level performance at reduced cost, today, from open weight labs.
This has been a thing for years, and so much so, that there's an entire TV with a dedicated second screen that shows you ads underneath your main screen: https://www.telly.com
No one rich enough flying what the average person would consider a "private jet" or private plane would be flying VFR from uncontrolled airport to uncontrolled airport. The "ultra rich" are not puttering around in single-engine Cessnas
I do think you're ignoring a huge part of the problem though, and that's software support. Because reality OS is iOS-based, we're likely going to end up with the same limitations, and many professional industries (software engineering, for one) just won't be able to take advantage of the device fully.
Of course there's workarounds (I used GitHub Codespaces for a while on my iPad and went without a Mac, and you could use the desktop streaming available on the headset), but they are no match for the same convenience you get by staying fully within Apple's walled garden.