For better or worse they awoke the sleeping giant[1]. Curious to see how things play out with the fork (i.e. will vim users stay put or move on to neovim in the coming months/years).
As someone who has watched closely Neovim's development since its announcement, and used it as my daily text editor for literal years, I feel sad to say that it is early-stage vapourware. They kicked vim into action, then vim kicked them out of it.