I'm with you on the "attract traffic" point, and if the goal was actually trying to push Solaris as a desktop experience, I'm equally confused. More likely is that someone (or several someones) put a good bit of thought and time into this nifty feature, and simply would like to maximize the visibility of their achievement.

And as a regular Linux desktop user I must admit that one of the remaining rough edges (couldn't think of a better term) in the desktop experience of some distros is precisely what Linus is referenced as railing against.