Personally, I'm surprised this took as long to happen as it did. I thought the advantages of hiring cyanogen were obvious to any Android OEM (or potential Android OEM) for quite some time now.
Reminds me highly of those halcyon days of game modding, where everyone was building awesome Q1 and Unreal mods and levels. And one by one, at first slowly, those authors got plucked up and pulled into industry. The whole modding notion has become a rarity because, well, why mod when you can work in the commercial space making games? Prove yourself out by writing some decent mod content, then get hired.
Not terribly surprising either given the back and forth between Samsung and the CM team up to this point. Earlier this year they sent Galaxy S IIs to some members of the CM team. (T-Mobile has also been impressive in this vain, with their tweets, open sourced code that is in GitHub and actually in CyanogenMod as well as their inclination towards devices that don't have locked bootloaders).
