Well, and then you bring up some of the other issues. Yes, it allows you to listen to music, but the selection for it I have found to be limited. And even more annoyingly, more than once when I have asked to listen to a specific song, or a specific artist, instead of playing what I request, it plays a poor cover version of it. And, for example, if you ask Alexa to play a classical playlist, it'll generally play the same grouping of songs each time. Annoying.
And while yes, you can ask it about the weather or traffic, it can only tell you based on what you pre-select in settings. Which means it'll only ever tell you the traffic for one destination and weather for one location, which you have to log into the Echo app to update. When I am out of town, or looking for weather when packing to go on a trip, or looking to see how long it will take to get me somewhere other than work, the Echo is worthless.
As I said before, it has a lot of potential. But for right now, it lags fairly significantly behind apps such as Google Now. For a pricetag of $180, I am not sure that's a good thing.