They might be sorry for admitting this, but they have no choice -- once the clear question gets asked FB cannot hide the answer. It can lie, but it would be worse, as the lie will come out quickly and they would be in much hotter water: not only for doing something bad, but also for lying about it (effectively admitting they saw it as a bad practice). Pretending that what they did is not bad is their best option.
And of course Huawei and Lenovo will use data for other purposes -- they operate under different jurisdictions than FB. They also likely cannot keep ignore data requests for "national interests" even if they wanted to. And national interests include economic interests for sure.