I also think they do not want to make it non-free.
CentOS gained a lot of market share that RHEL lost, it is normal to gather them together again, I dont see an issue there, however I did see CentOS going worse as of late, it is better than going belly-up IMO, RH now has Fedora for the up-to-date stuff and CentOS for stability.
I think their removal of the Xen support was a mistake they regret, for one thing, then they didnt have a testbed which the corporate sector used, it does make a lot of sense.
About the future in general, well, I see it as a good move, it is not like RHEL clone people wont have an alternative if things go south, or nobody can do the same trick again.
As a Debian fan I consider Debian has enough following, we do not need a giant here that will crush everything. It is already too big for my taste, though havent seen anything bad technically yet. It is inevitable it will start to go (even more) dogmatic or lagging behind with no real compatition in the free world. Competition is good, even against your own pet project.