They remind me of hosted channels as well. I suspect it's easy to use ecash mints as a drop in replacement for hosted channels. They too provide decent obfuscation and it would be easy to list 2-4 providers directly in a wallet app. When the user has enough sats to buy a channel you could prompt them to do so and remind them that mints can and sometimes do steal, so it's advisable to avoid trusting them with meaningful amounts of money.