Apple succeeding here in terms of wireless audio would not be a big surprise.
There are already several different wireless formats that push out way more data than old school Bluetooth over short ranges, so they are rightly advertised as CD quality. Furthermore, they have been available for years. In fact, I am wearing KLEER wireless headphones right now that are vastly superior to the Bluetooth headphones out there. The main issue in the past was power usage and convenience, and of course, cross compatibility. Oh and cost. ie. The technology already exists. It's just the implementation that sucked, but not because of the quality of the sound.
What Apple seems to have done here is gotten around the cross compatibility issue by designing their own chips to be used in their own iDevices and their own (or Beats') headphones. And they can also licence the technology to other manufacturers. They can do this because they sell a bazillion iDevices a year and because they sell a bazillion headphones a year too, and they also licence to a lot of 3rd party companies already too.
What Apple had to tackle was the power usage and convenience (pairing, etc.) and cost. These don't seem like insurmountable issues when you remember they stuck a frickin' fingerprint scanner in the home button, for the masses, in every single one of their new model iPhones from 2013 on. The original prototype fingerprint scanner that Apple bought for this from something like a decade before was briefcase sized.
Kleer is superior but older tech at this point, especially from a power consumption point of view, while in the meantime Bluetooth has advanced quite a lot in terms of power consumption, bandwidth, cost and pairing. There are other codecs available within Bluetooth besides the usual SBC which is what Apple Bluetooth audio uses. There was no reason not to just throw Apt X on there other than not wanting to license it from CSR. The cheap and lazy headphone makers were too busy making $800, then $1200, then $1500, then $2000 and now $4000 headphones laughing all the way to the bank to care about adopting that. This time whatever Apple brings will stick whatever it is. I just hope it really is what I expect and I'm bothered that no specs have been issued beyond "well it has a sensor to see if it's in your ear and it will be offered as a playback device to other devices signed into your iCloud. That's all well and good but I want to hear about the meat. The actual protocol.
But the whole time with Bluetooth audio was an option to just pass audio in whatever format the source is in, and in iTunes that's of course 256kbps AAC, this could have been in the newer low energy modes. But none of the headphone manufacturers wanted to embrace that. So I'm hoping Apple have finally implemented this. I just wish they would say they did or not. This of course could have been implemented in software without new hardware but I suppose since the headphone makers have been so daft as to not ever do it Apple had to offer a hardware solution and hold their hands and get them to do it for a fee. These are the same clowns that are tripping over themselves trying to make some headphone at the $4k price point since apparently that's the new thing for them to do. This chip better not be just about pairing or whatever and I hope it does not preclude makers from including their own tech like DSP, ear canal calibration and noise cancellation.
I can say I had a Thinkpad from about a decade ago with a fingerprint reader, it was very tiny. Some HP windows mobile PDAs had one too more than a decade ago. the huge improvement Apple implemented was that you don't have to swipe and it's really fast and with dry fingers works the first time. Those readers sometimes needed a few swipes to get in.
For quite some time you could sign into an Apple TV by just placing your phone near it, and it would pair via Bluetooth and sign you into iCloud. I guess the chip is a turnkey solution for those headphone makers too lazy to do anything but sell diaphragm coil things for higher and higher amounts of money with more and more bling. I think the only real innovation here if true is that they have a solution to pass and decode native 256kbps AAC. The sensor and iCloud playback stuff is fluff IMHO. some real ear canal calibration, noise cancellation, DSP HRTF, DSP EQ type stuff would have been something to talk about.