To understand this, you have to understand the relationship Red Hat Enterprise Linux has with recompile derivatives. While the compiled RPMs for RHEL cost money and are not redistributable without a license, the source RPMs are nearly all open source. Anyone with a RHEL license can download the RHEL SRPMs and do a recompile. This was great for people who want a RHEL-alike without paying for licenses and CentOS (and then Scientific Linux) came into existence. Red Hat was pleased with this because it gave a cheap way for enterprise customers to try RHEL and eventually become customers who pay for licenses/support.
Then came Oracle Linux who did the exact same thing as CentOS and Scientific Linux, but started charging for licenses and support outside of Red Hat's control. Red Hat wasn't pleased so they started packaging their SRPMs so instead of them containing upstream tarball with RH patch files, they would ship tarballs only or mega huge patch files without comments pointing to the relevent Red Hat bugzilla bug. This made it harder for Oracle to provide support to their customers, but it also had the effect of causing CentOS to get delayed by a good amount every new RHEL release.
Without a quick turnaround on CentOS releases that match RHEL releases, it threatened to kill their "the first one is free" business model. And it probably caused some customers to switch to cheaper Oracle value-added distributors. So Red Hat's only remaining move is to make a relationship with CentOS official. Presumably most of the relationship with be done in private to keep Oracle from gaining an advantage.
And that is a good thing for Linux because it can use a lot of good technology from the kernel. The major issue is that systemd requires cgroups and that means no support for kFreeBSD. Even if the ex-Canonical people recused themselves, systemd was always going to have an uphill battle.
There is a Debian derivative that has decided to use systemd, but it's -- the still incubating -- Tanglu.
A cool feature would be the ability to provide selected apps with spoofed data.
That feature was proposed for Cyanogen and a patch was written. It was never included out of fears that developers would block Cyanogen from installing apps on the (then named) Android Market.
With your bare hands?!?