This is the dream. From the end user's perspective there has never been a good reason to have a centralized server between them and the person they want to talk to. If Matrix can pull this off it has the potential to go way beyond chat. I will be following them much more closely following this announcement.
Skype was never maintained by a non-profit foundation, and was never open source. Even if companies building on Matrix like New Vector get acquired by whoever, the project itself should live on.
