That presumably helped getting (relatively NDA free, no less!) access to the part. Again, I have no idea what Intel says if you want to buy less than a tray worth of anything (much less get detailed assistance/permission, they certainly weren't shy about squishing Nvidia on QPI chipsets...); but the position on the rPI is that (while it is sincerely cheap, and the vendor has no obvious conflicts of interest in selling as many of the things as they can, as uncrippled as they can), it barely matters whether the Gerbers are open or not when the core SoC is practically a special favor from Broadcom.
Intel's availability situation is clearly better for socketed parts (since, even if they won't talk in units of less than a thousand, resellers abound who do whatever they want); but I don't know what the story is for things like chipsets and BGA parts. My personal interest is less in the freedom of the board (since the economics of DIY vs. some pacific-rim slave factory will always be dubious); but the firmware. Intel have, in contrast to their generally good position on graphics, been kind of dicks compared to AMD in terms of Coreboot vs. UEFI+whatever proprietary features Intel has dreamed up these days. An Intel-supported, enough-UEFI-to-actually-be-useful, board would be real news(yeah, Intel has 'Tianocore', which is the OSS implementation of all the boring parts of UEFI; but the good shit, of the sort actually required to do a coreboot port or a fully-open UEFI build, has been lacking for all but the most antique of their gear).