Read the release, this is a collaboration with Google and Mozilla. But you are right, one of the main reasons CUDA is so popular is because of cuBLAS. And it is a big pipe dream that you could program a GPU without being aware of communication and memory transfer behavior.
Won't we have HSA in the future? HSA is supposed to provide unified coherent memory access to both CPU and GPU. Do you think HSA is a pipe dream? If so why?
OK, it's not that HSA isn't useful, it's that coordination between the CPU and GPU is still stupidly hard and has a lot of CPU-side overhead, making it impractical for small workloads. The problem is that a large number of small workloads still can't be done by a GPU. I'm seriously doubting the limits of "coherent memory access" -- unless the GPU can snoop into the CPU's cache (or the GPU/CPU share L1 cache -- eeek), then you will still need cache flushes and fences. Let's hope that "HSA" is a lot lower overhead than current CPU/GPU combos from AMD/Intel.