However you may feel about Red Hat's actions, I'd trust that folks at Red Hat have done enough legwork to figure out that "CentOS as a loss leader for RHEL" wasn't working out the way people like to imagine it would.
(Note: I am a former Red Hat employee, but I do not have and haven't had specific access to any data estimating what CentOS Linux was expected to add to or subtract from the bottom line. But I feel pretty sure that many deals won and lost have been examined, many customers spoken to, and numbers crunched to inform their actions.)
