This effort was spearheaded by Google first – as the search giant initiated this process on a large scale, allowing you to obtain stock Android apps off the Play Store – where these apps were previously unavailable. HTC has also followed suit, and chances are there might be other hardware manufacturers who would also head in the same direction.
The biggest benefit of doing so would be to make software version fragmentation less of an issue among Android users, and at least users will be able to get the latest versions of particular apps – without having to wait for the operating system version to catch up for said hardware. The latest version of HTC Internet will require Android 4.4 KitKat as the bare minimum before it can be installed on your device.