We've been extremely happy with gitolite, and I do not see us moving off of that software.
Ya'll should provide an easy to use configuration for using gitlab as a RO mirror of any arbitrary git repository.
Hope you have a lot of great new things in the pipe that gitlab-shell is providing. If configuration was the problem, why not try and scrape gitolite's configuration directly and run gitlab from that? There's certainly another acceptable path- the one you took, creating your own repo server- but I have a hard time qualifying this- as this press release does- as a feature: it's a migration, a lateral jump: there's nothing new that happens, nothing better, it's just a different configuration routine to do what Gitlab and Gitosis.
I wont be suckered by such suavity, but there's a lot of people who would be more enticed by "new super configurable way better than gitolite repo server" as a sales pitch that probably were happy enough running Gitlabs at it used to run that don't really see this as a feature, as they were already on top of it. When releasing features, put the featureful ones foremost.