Whether they intend to do any sort of banking activities or not, Coinbase is one of the only exchanges I actually trust and they provide a decent service to people who want to buy and sell bitcoin.  If they're expanding, I think that's a good thing for bitcoin overall.

By the way, OP ought to provide a link when starting up a discussion like this that deal with news.  I hadn't heard anything about Coinbase expanding to NY and I thought that state was pretty anti-crypto.