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It's a trading hub at the confluence of a lot of transit pipelines. If you want a lot of liquidity in a physical market so that an associated paper market can develop, then forcing people to trade a standard contract is quite a good way to achieve that. Forcing people to trade a specific location helps a lot with that.
h2o
Thankfully won't impact Brent prices too much.
Edit: to elaborate, the $1 thing is only May futures contracts, June contracts are fine. Also, the oil storage situation in the US has been known about for a few months, the rest of the world still has at least six months capacity.
This price collapse is apparently because the "depot" (?) in Cushing, OK is full, and the rules with Texas Intermediate is people with the contracts have to take delivery of it there (i can't get my head round that). Texas Intermediate prices for June are fine and Brent Crude is basically unaffected.