Who's "people"? Consumers aren't gonna buy a new phone just to get U+22E5B VOMITING MALE PLATYPUS WITH DESCENDER, and system implementers are free to add the new emoji and ignore everything else in the standard.
In general, I think new emoji is going to be more persuasive to the average person to update than 'bugfixes to VCard deserialisation in the Contacts app' or the other usual release notes.
Oh yes they are going to buy a new phone for that, at least if their friends send it to them and they can't see it. But mostly it just encourages them to install new free OS updates sooner.
Reminder: U+22E5B is an actual Unicode character, namely 𢹛 (which comes from Hanyu Dacidian and I have no further public information available, but anyway). New emoji usually goes into the specific portion of the Plane 1 so U+1Fxxx would have been more believable ;-)
