I'm personally not a huge fan of this, since I can't see the (as in: my) benefit of this. I don't have an azure account yet (this is where the benefit for MS is I guess ;) ).
I would love to just register my selfhosted environment without any hassles.
Maybe this would even bring more people to register their selfhosted environment, which could bring more people to buy a hosted environment. Could potentially even benefit MS to lower the initial hurdle for new users.