And if your headphones are getting a digital signal instead of a 3.5mm jack, you can put the relatively big and heavy DAC
in the headphones instead of using the dinky one built into the phone. The lightning port will also deliver more power than the 3.5mm jack.
A pair of headphones has space for something the size of a Fiio E5 (potentially several times that size), but there's no way Apple or anybody else is going to built that quality internal to a phone.
Earbuds won't have the space for that hardware, so I expect the phone will still have an onboard DAC and an analog output mode over the lightning connector for use with cheap/small lightning earbuds and to allow a passive lightning/3.5mm adapter.
EDIT: As an addendum, I'm expecting we'll see a lot of bluetooth headphones with the iPhone 7, following in the Apple Pencil's "plug into lightning to pair and charge" setup. Hopefully also using the wire for data while they're connected.