I expect the location requirement is coming to Google from the media companies. As lots of media is licensed for a particular market, and there are a number of easy VPN solutions that can disguise your IP (and your nominal location) the only way to be "sure" of where you are is to ask the GPS unit. This allows Google Play to do "region coding" and for apps to call a standard API to enforce their own region coding requirements (say netflix or other streaming services).