Yeah - I was also kinda surprised they accepted it as they are generally kinda edgy on less radical stuff. So certainly a big achievement!

Yeah - as nothing should be started until connections start coming in, it really should be fine. This is also heavily used in "normal" Linux distros such as Fedora, so the mechanism is pretty well tested and robust by now.

Yeah - I can imagine quite a few other cases where a network accessible daemon could be used to provide functionality to various client applications. Maybe for example a IM daemon the various IM apps could use as a backend as long as it's still not possible (IIRC) to really contribute improvements to the built-in messaging system (which is quite nice, but missing fat to many features and seem to be long term neglected). Or a socket activated speech to text/text to speech service apps can use, etc.