It seems like one of those politics things. Focus on PR to get the randoms behind it and get people to switch, doesn't matter the quality, how you talk about it is what matters.
Do we have a name for this yet? We had "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" for MS' playbook, but Red Hat's run theirs enough times that it seems like we ought to have a name for it (and it's definitely different from Microsoft's EEE)