Don't forget the likely increased revenue tying more accounts to real names to sell impressions that are more targeted. It's all about the money.

I think the goal is ultimately more targeted advertising. In a way this is helpful. It would be great for adult advertising to stop showing up on cartoon videos.

Google has claimed right from the beginning that they want G+ to be a "social layer" across all of their services, which could also be seen as a "social network", but not in the same way Facebook is a "social network.

To be fair, I think they shifted their messaging a little bit (vis-a-vis whether G+ was intended as a FB-style destination network or a social layer that happens to have a stream) to take advantage of the initial burst of interest/success in the actual social-network-stream part of Google+. But yea, there are plenty of people who are too stupid/disingenuous to understand the "social layer" concept they're going for even in cases where it's very straightforward.