Apple obviously wasn't interested in Lala's users, and I don't expect they were interested in code, so was it a talent acquisition or did Apple just do this to remove a competitor to future online music services?
Edit: spelling
Edit: spelling
This is just tinfoil hat speculation, I don't have anything to back it up. However, this is the way that high level, powerful executives and a certain class of start-up founder think about markets.
That is a little out there, isn't it? It would be like buying a small company because their servers used GNU/Linux instead of OS X. If they were targeting places that made Flash "a relevant technology for some users," wouldn't they target Pandora, Farmville, graphic design schools that teach freshman Flash, etc?
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/its-almost-here-exclusive-v...
Non-transferrable licenses are quite believable, if the record companies considered Lala an experiment to test the waters. They'd put safeguards in to make sure that the licenses didn't end up at some place like Apple, so they (the record companies) can decide the pace of growth of this kind of service.
Note that if you check the date of the acquisition, and the date of the close of the service, it's something very close to six months, which sounds like the kind of grace period that would be plausible to allow for shut down of the non-transferable licenses.
Particularly, "Network Based Digital Rights Management System" (http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=esKwAAAAEBAJ&dq=%...) could be valuable for Apple.