That's true, and while we all get to enjoy the new protocol, it seems like its primary beneficiary will be big organizations that have gigantic repos with massive numbers of refs in them. Furthermore, there's a clear orientation towards specialization -- putting that giant repo on a central server. Google clearly stands to benefit more from this work than those of us who use git as a distributed version control system. Who pays the piper calls the tune.
In all fairness, GitHub also has much to benefit from this too, playing host of the Mozilla git mirror, which also has a relatively large number of refs: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev
