I get the impression from a lot of the coverage lately that they've been working on an actual plan to make money. I'm speculating, but this could involve developers working on features or even an alternate platform conducive to that effort that wouldn't show up in the currently public-facing free system.

I saw something similar with Heroku. In fact, in the RubyConf talk, Adam Wiggins pretty much stated that they were asked by their investors to switch gears to the making money part of things. Thus, the Heroku service stayed more or less the same (and good, I might add) for a period of time up until this recent announcement that other stuff had been happening behind the scenes.