"The point" is to make Congress stop yelling at Apple. Forcing developers to jury-rig something other than a system API gives them an out, rhetorically.
I find the word "jury-rigged" to be a stretch for "get the MAC address". There is no difference between the BSD API to get the MAC address and the Cocoa API to get the UDID; maybe to a software historian, but certainly not to a member of Congress: the level of explanation you are looking at there is "a mechanism supported by the vendor that returns a unique identifier for the device".