There really are a lot of parallels with OpenSSH's history. There were the "Oh, God! Theo forked SSH!", "It's just OpenBSD, who uses that?", and all the rest. Now everyone uses it, and it's a good thing. The wait time for it to be ready and available to all platforms was a small price to pay, well worth it, and quite small in retrospect.
This is their choice, but their impact in the security of IT is much smaller this way because most servers are running Linux. It is surely a great result to have an operating system like OpenBSD that can be proud of the security level reached and the small amount of vulnerabilities over the years, however if you analyze the computer security problem from a vendor-neutral standpoint, there is more at it than the availability of niche secure systems.
I don't use OpenBSD for my own environments, but at the same time, I can understand why they code the way they do. Everyone ends up a biased toward their platform of choice in how they code, what functions they use, etc, it's just that the OpenBSD team is militantly upfront and open in their biases. Given their track record in creating secure software, and in auditing others' software, I'd argue their end result is appreciable, even if I'm not directly using those results.