Is there a particular reasoning behind breaking out the binaries into -utils?

Not really. The binaries aren't required for the library to be linked against, and they're not really specific to -devel either.

Yea, as a follow-up. From the Packaging practices page:

This is not an automatic subpackage, you must use patterns to utilise it. It is provided for instances that it may not be suitable to have binaries present, i.e. for a library package.