We tried, but it was something like $0.50 extra patent license fee to ship AAC (on top of any costs involved in licensing a decoder)... so that idea didn't fly. ISTR we even had it working in some internal builds at one point...
I was curious to see the various cost differences between MP3, AAC, and WMA. It looks like
this doc matches what you say for AAC, and also has the WMA and MP3 prices in it.
Centrafuse is doing the same thing currently, where they don't build in AAC support. What they did do (since they run on Windows and x86) is to point people to a free for non commercial use decoder DLL that can be added in.
For everything else that I deal with, it seems the need to add MPEG4 video probably helped the cause to add the audio part.
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