AFAIK that's for "real" background running apps. For example, a news app may want to download news in the background so every time you launch it you can always read the latest news immediately, but there's no point downloading news you are not going to read. Therefore, suppose that you always run the news app at around 8 o'clock, then the scheduler should be able to learn this and only launch the app in the background to download at, say, 7 o'clock.
Yeah, that's what I read too.
NFC is definitely happening over here in a big way by the way - everything here is preparing for it. Also it seemed when I was in Norway, a lot of stores already had it.