I don't see FreeBSD's init trying to absorb most of the userland system utilities.
Whether or not it is in one repository isn't really the issue at hand here. It is that a bunch of desktop related stuff is worming its way into the systems to the point where you'll be running a whole slew of new, buggy and sloppy code on your servers if you're not very careful just so that the systemd folks get to scratch their NIH itches.
And even when in one repository i think you can grab the BSD utils without getting the kernel and whatsnot in one big tar-ball.
If you try to grab say just the dns daemon from systemd you can't do so directly. you would have to grab the tar-ball for the whole of systemd, and then attempt to extract just the parts dealing with the dns daemon.
Damn it, LFS have found doing this for udev so demanding that they have switched to eudev for their non-systemd edition (yep, they now have their own systemd edition going alongside the "traditional" one).
I don't think the kernel developers care that much about what systemd is doing (except for the notorious clash about systemd interpreting a debug option meant for the kernel and crashing the boot...), so you can't say the kernel is copying or doing anything.
The distros, however, are possibly the ones you want to blame for pushing and supporting systemd. Which is actually funny because the way it's going, systemd is laying foundations for a new kind of linux distributions to which distributions will certainly have to adapt if they want to keep it.
Systemd is a cancer, it will end up killing Linux if this goes on unchecked. At least Torvalds seems to (most of the time) know his stuff, the way they replaced the memory management left me with a bad taste but in the end it worked out. What's happening with Systemd is absolutely unpalatable and I hope that Redhat and other distros take note, there are a lot more Linux systems on servers than on Desktops and if they believe that expending all this effort on Linux on the desktop so they can better compete with Windows they might just lose their dominance on the server because of it.
Red Hat is developing systemd. It has nothing to do with making Linux palatable on the desktop, but a severe case of NIH, which to be honest is hardly new in Linux-land.
systemd won't kill Linux. Linux development is out of the hands of hobbyists and enthusiasts now and corporate users and developers don't care about the holy wars. Red Hat ships systemd, Red Hats users will use systemd and that will be that.
Their existing server customers are likely to be sitting on RHEL7 for quite some time. And i suspect that the workstation customers, mostly military as best i can tell, are in part pushing for systemd. Logind etc after all is heavily focused on multi-seats.