Yeah so basically the tokens they issue will all get to vote on July 4th 2018 to try and form a formal blockchain. If it implements the guidelines of the EOS.IO system it will create a public blockchain that follows that standard and companies would need to use those tokens to make applications on that blockchain (at least that's what I understand).

While they can also create their own private blockchains based off of EOS I imagine some of them will want to interact with a public blockchain which would need to be this EOS token one.

In summary, what I gather from the whitepaper is the goal is to have the current tokens become a key component of the platform, they just don't want to promise that for legal reasons incase someone gobbles up enough tokens to out vote them.