I never quite got a warm-fuzzy feeling from npm -- the tool, the service, the company. This announcement does nothing to help, from my perspective. Is my dependency on this or that JavaScript library something that really needs to be owned by a for-profit company?
I also kind of wonder what is the real value of a centralized repository versus just directly referencing git repos. I haven't used this gpk[0] project yet, but it looks like an interesting alternative, on paper.