A nice summation of what it is and how it came to be.
With some available tools listed as well. Thank you.
The big picture, going from a lots of "best-of-breed" point solutions to management to more of an integrated solution.
The danger of all "unified" approaches is of course how they cope with some piece of must-have kit they don't have a standard interface for (or possibly something with a proprietary UI it's makers really don't like you being able to hook into through an API).
This time around it does sound quite promising.
On demand growth of processing and storage when needed and (nearly) painless scaling up if that's still not sufficient. All the while quietly gathering performance data warning you of impending failure in time for you to retire the misbehaving bit of kit without anyone noticing. A smooth, dram free and affordable IT service.
Time will tell how well the implementations deliver the concept.