That would be one way, but what's commendable is that they went further and HIP is actually also a common thin API on top of CUDA and their own platform. They could've just stopped at converting code, but they did not -- and that's something that might save them and give people enough incentive to support their products. You can keep your NVIDIA path that'll be compiled with the nvcc backend and target both platforms with the nearly the same code, especially on host (and often also device side).
