It seems to me that this gives Skype a lot more exposure to business applications, especially in the SMB sector.
There’s a lot of coverage about this elsewhere online. Here’s some recommended reading.
Of course there has been a number of people demanding that Skype open their network to interoperability with the standards-based SIP world, key amongst them Voxeo’s Dan York and Gizmo5’s Michael Robertson. For their part Skype seemed reluctant, but maybe that was just gamesmanship.