The path to the destination is based on the Destination IP address and the Layer 3 Switch's determination of the best path to that address. So it's routing. In fact, such functionality has been available in Bay and Cisco routers for years and years. But the new classes of products provide hardware assist for these functions and therefore perform them much faster with no performance penalty associated with actually using the feature. And such functionality is important for WAN switches and WAN Access Devices.
Some vendors take the concept even further.
The application type cannot always be determined from looking for a Well Known Port number. Some applications don't have Well Known Port numbers, some applications have one for their control channel, but a randomly selected port number is established for each data channel. Sometimes corporations choose to use different port numbers as a policy, for example, to distinguish internally generated HTTP traffic from Internet-based traffic. So some vendors monitor information passed over control channels to determine dynamically the port numbers presently being used by each flow for each application. That's useful, new, and different.