Oh, wow. I totally missed this, but that is a rather big deal. From a business perspective, it is an understandable choice. Doing the footwork yourself eats up massive amounts of time. Leaving that to resellers means freeing up time and other resources for development and support. From the user perspective, however, it is probably not ideal.
I hope Ultimaker makes sure not to make the same mistakes Makerbot made.
Don't forget it is the community that develops a lot of innovations. The standard printer is pretty good, but if you want to make it truly excellent, you are generally best off implementing a couple of improvements the community developed for certain problems.