The thing is, I'm not so sure RedHat actually lost revenue over CentOS. The people who want to use CentOS is a very different type of userbase than the people who would use RedHat/RHEL, and the CentOS people would simply choose Debian or something else over RedHat.
From purely a business perspective I think the entire thing naïvely makes sense, from a far-away view without much knowledge of the business space. But once you look a bit closer I don't think it does.