Hello Phillip,
A1
Please refer to the RM, rev.12.1, Section 31.3.2 SRAM accessibility
"To supplement the main system RAM, FlexRAM can be used as system RAM. However,
FlexRAM accesses involve additional system latencies."
This is because FlexRAM is not tightly coupled with the core.
As you can see below, the FlexRAM is a slave on the Crossbar switch.

The SRAM_L and SRAM_U regions are contiguous, mapped right next to each other.
But FlexRAM starts at 0x14000000.

A2.
That simply means that the FlexRAM is initialized with all ones, like each 32b word is written with 0xFFFFFFFF.
Regards,
Daniel