What will happen with the existing Eclipse SDK? Also what about GWT? Splitting the IDE communities is bold. So many questions though.
What's pretty crazy is that they were insane enough to base it on Eclipse in the first place, seeing as it's probably the only IDE that so many people hate so intensely.
I'm a Linux user primarily, use OS X at work, and detest Windows, yet I'd pick Visual Studio ca. 1999 over Eclipse any day. I'm an Emacs user, yet I'd switch to Vim in a heartbeat if I had to pick between Vim and Eclipse.
I suspect you will find quite a lot of people with similarly strong hate for Eclipse. It's a trainwreck. Though in slow motion, as Eclipse never seems to do anything fast.
Is GWT still even a thing they care about? It seems like they're pushing people towards Dart and Angular at this point.
I/O last year was seriously thin on GWT, and it looks this year like there's only one session, which got misfiled in the schedule under "Google Wallet."