This condition was anything but arbitrary in the context of Hardy
and Ramanujan's research at the time, and their work has branched
and bloomed into several current research areas. To
understand why, I need to give a bit of history.
In the 17th Century, Albert Girard and Pierre de Fermat found
exactly which numbers can be represented as a sum of two squares, and
gave a formula for the number of such combinations [0].
This result by itself was just a curiosity; what made it
interesting and enduring was the depth of the mathematics it
spawned. Leonhard Euler and others in the 18th Century studied the
natural generalization of the problem by replacing the two squares
with the more general quadratic form x^2 + n*y^2 for various
integers n. This turned out to be extremely difficult and
fruitful and led to 19th and 20th Century class
field theory ([1],[2]).
With the theory of representations as quadratic forms being an
active research area in the early 20th Century (in which Hardy, Littlewood
and Ramanujan contributed significantly), they branched out to higher order polynomials such as sums
of cubes, and shifted their focus from the existence of
combinations to the function of the number of combinations; that
is, from a question of structure to a question of distribution*.
This perspective led to numerous developments building connections
with harmonic analysis, additive combinatorics, even dynamical
systems and ergodic theory. Research in these questions continues
to this day.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_theorem_on_sums_of_...
[1] http://www.math.toronto.edu/~ila/Cox-Primes_of_the_form_x2+n...
[2] Introduction to the Construction of Class Fields, Harvey Cohn.
*For the sum of cubes, in particular, the counting function is
mostly a 0-1 function whose distribution was studied by C. Hooley
(On the representation of a number as a sum of two cubes, Math. Z.
82 (1963), 259–266) and T. Wooley (Sums of two cubes, International
Mathematics Research Notices, 1995(4), 181. ).