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I see the story as a psychological allegory about growing up.
As a child, you play, run naked, explore nature, and generally live a blessed, blissfull life. This is the Eden bit.
However, as you grow older, you begin to try to put your experiences into some sort of order, you adopt beliefs about how things are and how they should be, you also become aware of what you are and what you should be. You learn things, good things, bad things, beautiful things and ugly things - and have to work to discriminate between them all. This process of growing up leads to all manner of tribulations (as well as providing its own benefits). This is the part where you have eaten the fruit.
So god, seeing his children growing up, has no option but to allow them to leave home, pay their own way in life, and in turn have children of their own. He simply bestows adulthood on them. Naturally, as any parent does, it's a time of mixed feelings. Pride in seeing one's children grown-up, and sadness (and possibly anger) at them no-longer being the doting wide-eyed children they once were.
Its a story we have all gone through, and one that must have been played out though every generation since (and possibly before) we came out of the trees. It's no wonder it has such a resounding and important place in a book that describes the human condition.
Lets just be glad it was old Jewish guys and not Sigmund Freud (wasn't he an old Jewish guy too?) who wrote Genesis, or we might have an even stranger creation story to contend with.
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