I'm glad to see this idea validated, and I think consul-template looks pretty awesome and well integrated with consul. consul-template takes advantage of consul specific features such as the consul services API and datacenters, which is really great for consul users. These are things I did not want to add and maintain in confd, since I'm supporting consul, etcd, and environment variables as backends I felt those would be one off features, which really belong in a consul focused tool like this.
Some will ask why did Hashicorp not just contribute to confd? Well they did. They added initial support for consul to confd almost a year ago and have been very helpful with my questions around consul ever since. The contributions go both ways too. I've been a contributor to Hashicorp's Packer project -- I added Ansible and GCE support and various bug fixes.
This is just how opensource works. I'm actually pretty happy to see one of my projects get so much attention and now inspire another project. That's the whole point right?