Valve Eyes a Walled Garden

Today, Valve announced a service that would essentially let us have a say in what games actually make it to be sold on Steam.  In the long voting tradition where America allows the throngs to elect its idols, Steam's Greenlight allows us to be the final arbiter in their walled garden.
My initial reaction, was of course, that Valve wanted to usurp Kickstarter. After all, it already has given Curse a shot across the bow with Workshop, a service that manages, downloads, and ranks game modifications. After browsing the forums, I discovered significant wishlisting, with players demanding their favorite titles. After fiddling around with it for a bit, and checking out the forums, I discovered that:

• Only developers, not fans, should submit. 
• It is only for complete (or near complete) games that would normally be submitted to Steam.
• Most of the titles look like they'd be terrible to play. 

In essence:

• Developers can judge fan response (and Valve's response) before they go all-in.
• Rather than having a completely walled garden, we serve as their wall.

This is exciting. After reading quite a bit about Apple's walled garden and it's arbitrary judgments, as well as seeing first-hand beautiful applications Apple said no to with no real rhyme or reason thanks to jailbreaking, we become the gateway. I can't wait to see how the system develops, especially with Valve also moving to publish software.

Steam community can be found here.  The highest profile game on it is currently Postal 2.