No. We partnered with Funambol to provide this service, and it carries a significant cost to both develop and maintain and scale this specific service, as the announcement says.
Supporting hundreds of different mobile phones is an incredibly expensive task, and on top of that we've added a layer that saves those contacts to couchdb and replicates them locally for you, to be used with any application you wish.
While we all love and use free software, it's completely unreasonable to demand that services be provided for free. The service also provides a 30 day free trial, where you can perform a one-time sync if you wish to have a backup of your contacts.
I personally believe that allowing people to sync their contacts from almost any mobile phone into a Linux desktop is a huge step forward.