the higher-end switches take considerable engineering, just on the hardware side, and are fairly high-margin products. If the networking equipment space becomes OS agnostic, or consolidates around OpenSwitch, this removes one of Cisco's major advantages (their huge installed-base, network OS dominance, customer switching costs), and allows HP (and others) to compete directly on network equipment hardware architecture/performance/cost. More competition in that area would be a very good thing (maybe not so good for Cisco's dominance). It's also good to decouple the hardware from the OS/software, and allow innovation in both areas independently.