I'd say that the reason behind making the base removable would be to make it easier to package it. I've never seen a PowerCD box, but I'd imagine that the base and player would have been separated for transport?

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The PowerCD is indeed separated from its base in the box. They used two styrofoam trays similar to present day packaging.

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Considering the generous amount of foam packing material and box sizes of most Apple products, I doubt that was the reason. There's gotta be a CPU of some sort in the base to support the "computer-less" multimedia presentation capabilities of the PowerCD. Dollars to donuts, they were planning to grace the face of some FROG DESIGN packaged Mac with the "spinner" when 2x, 4x, & 8x data x-fer rated CD-ROM drives rendered such an installation obsolete.

IMHO, of course.