Fedora is approximately as "vanilla" as Arch. If any patch was in a Fedora package which you had to pull out, it's because upstream did not accept the patch for some reason, but the maintainer decided it was critical enough to diverge. This isn't/wasn't SOP.
The Linux kernel patches are, as above, not really where they make money, which is consulting. But there is no such thing as an "upstream stable release" which Red Hat contributes to in any meaningful way.
Kernel features which are going to go into Fedora go into mainline. Not the LTS release. RHEL's support policy has a somewhat strict SLA on kernel ABI/API, and their support cycle is much longer than upstream "LTS" which "everyone else" (whomever that is, because Canonical and SuSE have policies similar to Redhat) uses.
Patches are cherry picked from mainline not to the "upstream stable" release, but to whatever version of the kernel RHEL-whatever shipped with. 2.6.18 for RHEL5, 2.6.32 for RHEL6. Forever. It has been this way essentially forever is not a new change, has nothing to do with excluding the rest of the community and everything to do with the fact that it was the only way that nvidia/emulex/whatever_hardware_vendor would agree to support Linux AT ALL. They were not going to rewrite their driver for RHEL3.5. Just RHEL3, now and forever so the ABI had to stay the same.
The patchset is publicly available as part of the SRPM, and as a raw .patch file. It is not individual patches anymore because Oracle was cherry picking patches from their cherry picks to repackage Redhat's source and poach customers.
It was moved to a single, enormous patch file so Oracle's kernel engineers actually had to work to integrate their ksplice/RAC/whatever patches, but that's politics.