Firstly, I've learnt something about what Red Hat does thanks to your article, and it sounds very nice.

However, if all Shuttleworth wants is Red Hats code, then why hasn't he aligned Ubuntu to it already???

There are so many markets currently where the market share of linux is miniscule. In such a market, any thing done to increase share by any _linux_ benefits all distributions. Therefore the question should be: "Will doing this significantly increase the market share of linux?"

If the answer is yes, then do it. End of story.