And in any case the NVIDIA proprietary userspace driver stack doesn't work with the Nouveau kernel driver anyway. Maybe this means there is hope that it will someday.
When Microsoft or sony come knocking to have this conversation they might be more prepared to put a specialist hardware team between the system developers and hardware makers coupled with a very strict QA process.
1. Hire a lot of kernel hackers
2. Try to get the open source driver maintainers to improve integration in a way that is closer to the actual hardware (without giving everything away), and then somehow tie their proprietary driver into that integration code.
The letter certainly doesn't express interest in improving the capabilities of the nouveau drivers to a point that they can compete with the proprietary drivers in terms of 3d performance, and I think that it would be prudent of the open source driver maintainers to be skeptical of Nvidia's motives given the timing and limited nature of the release.
3. Improve the relationship between NVIDIA and the open-source community.
If AMD was both much better on Linux (due to #2/#3), and they were "good enough" for a substantial portion of users who're now using SteamOS, that's a lot of lost revenue for NVIDIA.
Nvidia is direly amoral in their completely asinine hatred of FOSS and their inability to contribute. I won't support a business with that mentality. They either grow up and play ball in mesa or I don't give them a cent.
But AMD has terrible performance and instability in both drivers, and they still have proprietary firmware. It is like trying to have ones cake and eat it too - "hey look, we have foss drivers, except not!" is not good enough. The whole point of foss drivers is not hiding anything from users, and having binary firmware blobs making their devices impossible to reimplement without reverse engineering defeats the purpose.
Then there is Intel, who just makes a foss driver as their only option and does it right. So my next build is using 4600 HD graphics and I'll just play minecraft and quake live rather than whatever shiny new shooter Valve brings to Linux.
Valve is looking at using Wayland to power Steam, which means that NVIDIA basically need a proper DRM/KMS part in the kernel, and that part will likely be the DRM-side of nouveau.
My guess is that NVIDIA will contribute to the kernel parts of nouveau using open documentation to get patches accepted, while continuing to work on their closed-source userspace.
It's almost certainly not gamers that complain abut the lack of free drivers. But people like me that want good performance but don't like the problems the proprietary drivers bring, or people concerned about the driver's security (everybody is paranoid now) and not wanting it at their datacenter.