Say you were interviewing someone and their resume looks great. You talk to them and feel the same way, and are ready to hire them. The fact that Knuth calls you and says, "this was my best student in 20 years" is only icing on the cake--you were going to hire him anyway.
It's a good PR move for MS, and one that will hopefully help them in their apparent goal to win devs back over. More importantly, for some random stumbling across the site, a prominent statement that this is MS's idea would be more likely to get them to upgrade than if it appeared to be some random site. The IE8 bit is highly unfortunate, though.
A lot of users don't understand the concept of a browser. 'Internet Explorer' is that thing they use to get to their internet. "What the hell is this Morzilla, I want my Internet!"
