Daniel Hutmacher shows another good use of the APPLY operator:
You can tell by the plan why this is an inefficient query: the SQL expression in the common table expression is executed once for every time that it’s referenced in the code.
Better living through CROSS APPLY
You could store the results of the CTE in a temp table, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, why not use the CTE once, and then return four rows for each row that the CTE spits out? That’s exactly what CROSS APPLY does.
Read the whole thing and appreciate that much more all the nice things you can do with APPLY.