What is the big whoop about Facebook Friend Connect?

Hotel LarabeachImage by Abdallah ♫ via Flickr

I don’t understand how Facebook’s new Friend Connect is substantively different from their pre-platform API functionality. External Web sites already have the ability to allow users to sign in to Facebook and retrieve their friends and profile from an external site. Friend connect just appears to be some better UI controls for doing this withouth having to jump off to Facebook and approve the 3rd party app. What am I missing?