>What kept this from being available til now? Seems like Cisco had it for ages.

Cisco is the one who wrote it and open sourced it. Netgate is just putting a wrapper around other people's (Cisco's) code.

>Is this a joke? A jab?

No, dropping packets is step 1 to proving you can get past some of the current CPU bottlenecks. Actually doing something useful is obviously significantly more work, but no point bothering with that work if the CPU is still the bottleneck.