Yup. It's a common solution for video codec blocks, camera pipelines, etc, on ARM SoCs (open driver/library, closed firmware for the peripheral) -- less common for GPUs. I'm personally not at all offended by the "open drivers/libraries on host, closed firmware on peripheral" model -- it's a reasonable tradeoff and, as you point out, lets the vendors keep control over their secret sauce while still allowing for completely open software stacks on the host/AP side of the world. Apart from purists who want to have source for every programmable block on the SoC, everybody wins.
From one point of view the cost to Broadcom to making this open source is not nearly the same as for the other GPU vendors -- I suspect this RPC glue is not among the crown jewels of Broadcom's IP -- but from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't want to have to muck with closed binaries on the host side that are hard to debug, keep supported, adapt to changing APIs/ABIs, none of that matters -- the important bit is you get all the host side source.
Does this (or will this) support future / higher end parts using the same VideoCore architecture? It definitely increases my interest in the BCM SoC family if so...