Do you know what would be better than CarPlay? An open protocol. It's my phone and my car, why do I need both companies' blessings for connecting them?
Gauges I agree. Infotainment, who cares? It's not like CarPlay today is perfect. It routinely crashes on me mid-drive and requires a series of reboots to go back to working conditions.
Example: Having movies playing on infotainment wile the car is not parked is illegal in many countries, thus car companies want to make sure no 1st party integration will do that without the customer explicitly circumventing something.
If someone crashes when watching Alaskan Housewives or something on the infotainment screen, the car company wants to CYA by saying their system wasn't involved in the crash, it was an unauthorised 3rd party modification.