Looks they try competing against Cloudera and its HUE by having their own distro/management tool. Guess it's good news for hadoop eco-system.
1) "Red Hat vs SuSE" in linux analogy - such distro competition generated some confusions & lots of 'ahead power' to many sub-projects, e.c. kvm vs xen.
2) Fragmentation of piece of technology is dangerous? I don't think so. Hadoop already has a unified code base in Apache where both Hortonworks and Cloudera's contributions go back. I think "fragmentation" at the this layer where standardizations aren't always required is good thing.
This slide was published by @acmurthy at Hortonworks, which is a new company formed by core Hadoop committers from the Yahoo! Hadoop software engineering team.
http://www.hortonworks.com/