it's an excuse for mastering engineers to do a good job, instead of squashing the master for radio/earbuds, just like dsd, sacd, hdcd, etc. 44/16 is plenty good for playback, but since people don't have to work for it, they don't value it.
I think it's reasonable to modify a $75 pair of headphones to make them world beaters. If $1500 headphones aren't world beaters out of the box, they should be returned with prejudice.