custom attributes are significant in many ways
> provides flexibility for you to extend the functionality and implement attribute specific runtime enforcements for your API [Quota is just another attribute of a product, just an example how you could use an attribute]
> provides a means for you to classify, group your api products and apps for consumption - for eg, what to show in the portal, mapping to different consumer roles etc..
.. and there are several other examples how it can be used, specific to usecases
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What is interesting and important is that - Apigee provides you a easy way to configure these values and access them at runtime easily.
For eg, you can have attributes for your products, attributes for developers, attributes for apps.. and lets say you use
VerifyApiKey or OAuth Accesstoken verification policy in your flow-- all the information about your product, developers, app are loaded a flow variables for you to access within the flow, using this you could enforce any kind of runtime constraints and management functions
Have a look at there,
http://apigee.com/docs/api-services/reference/verify-api-key-policy#variables
and
http://apigee.com/docs/api-services/content/oauthv2-policy#flowvariables
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