Due to the volume, I still might use a regular Pi3 and off-the-shelf add-on boards, because designing the motherboard (which will need ethernet hardware, PSU, RFID and touch interface) will take a large chunk from the budget.
The CM might only make sense for large volume products.
I'd also imagine products with hard physical constraints, either from connector placement or size alone. For example these fairly popular diy portable pi projects that seem to pop up here and there
http://blog.parts-people.com/2012/12/20/mobile-raspberry-pi-... could be a lot smaller
or
https://n-o-d-e.net/terminal.html where the first step is to strip the connectors away to fit the profile
I wonder if it can be easily upgraded to the new CM.
As the Pi sucks at I/O, the idea is that you mount the HDD directly over USB and transfer files to it from a regular computer. Network transfers would be very slow due to the Pi bottleneck.
We offer the USB loading method as a faster way especially for the first time when you want to load up your entire catalogue!
I don't really understand where this could be usable and I would rather see the pi foundation use their resources to upgrade and sell more Pi Zeros!
The compute module exists due to customer demand - the regular Pi is not so easy to embed in another device.