Now, I don't know what makes things "better" for you but from the perspective of most licensees it is probably legally better to have a conditional patent grant than none at all, most of the time. But it will vary depending on, for example, the licensors (their) and licensees (your) patent portfolios and intention to enforce those aggressively as well as your strategies of defense. There's a huge difference between a company such as, say Oracle and Facebook, here.

Granting patents in the context of permissively licensed open source is a generous act and making the grant conditional is a way of not giving up your ability to form the strongest possible defense when you're brought into patent litigation. If you have been following along the recent years events (where is that patent apocalypse, anyone?) then it should be no surprise why companies need to do that.

Conditional patent grants are not new. Apache License v2.0 has a conditional patent grant [http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0]. Google added a conditional patent grant to WebM, complementing its Modified BSD license [http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/]. Google's Dart project is licensed under Modified BSD and has a.. you guessed it - conditional patent grant [https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/trunk/dart/PATE...].