I'm not going to wade into the commercial plugin debate, I have my own thoughts and opinions on the matter but i've chosen not to discuss them in public.

However, I will comment on the commercial theme page and why I think it was created. It was a carrot dangled in front of the theme developers to adopt the GPL. Prior to the commercial theme page the vast majority of commercial theme developers were not releasing their themes under the GPL.

This tactic was a big success for Matt and the WordPress.org team, it resulted in a large number of commercial theme developers adopting the GPL with only a few notable exceptions, Thesis being one of them.

I don't think it is a coincidence, no matter what theme developers may say, that so many theme developers adopted the GPL licensing at the same time almost immediately after this page was added to the repository.

What has happened since the commercial theme page was added? The quality of the themes and developers on that page has plummeted. Many of them I had never heard of before they were added to the page. Take a look at many of the theme developers that have been added to that page and you will find plenty of subpar themes being touted as commercial quality when in fact they wouldn't even be good as a free theme.