The comments I see are about technical solutions. I think Apple's happy that there's finally a reason for people without humongous music collections to pay $200 for 64MB of flash memory.
My cynical side agrees with you. It seems like an absurd markup, between 16GB and 64GB.
I've looked briefly into stripping an app: the ipa format is just zip. There is a plist with hashes of the assets. Don't know if that plist itself is hashed, but I'm thinking probably.