Yeah I think it's just a way to try and extract some money from the ecosystem.

But many people will never pay for Linux and it's even causing people to move away (eg to Mint which removes snap)

Perhaps it makes sense in the enterprise market though. They're always trying to push launchpad to us at work and I'm sure this will integrate with snap. But launchpad doesn't work for us because it only works with Ubuntu. So it's just a non starter for us, we have more distros to support. Sure Ubuntu is the biggest in our environment but we want a single pane of glass for everything. More similarities between distros would make that a lot easier.