First off, yes, that's good news. But let's see if this activity is maintained -- there are 22 pull requests and over 100 issues in the tracker. Some are noise, but many aren't. If 0.81 is still current 6 months from now... that wouldn't be good. What Automattic needs to take from this is that, if they want to take over primary development of a plugin, they should maintain it and be responsive about issues.

Second, are there other Automattic plugins that are also languishing? If so, well, see above.