Thanks!
Agreed, this approach is hilarious and highly regarded. But it actually isn't against Apple's rules. I'll post more details about it soon, so that others can benefit from it.
It is, it's against 2.5.4 specifically. We've had idle games taken down using this trick to keep the idle stuff going. You'll get an email one day with some bland reason along the lines of "Your app declares support for background audio but does not provide actual listening content to the user".
Basically you're living update to update.
Basically you're living update to update.