I sure hope so but i'm not entirely convinced that this effort wasn't at least partially driven by developers without all the facts behind the business side of the equation (which seems to have been overlooked or ignored for whatever reason, unless their IE8 usage statistics are much lower than elsewhere), I doubt it, IE8 is still important enough to worry about for most things, especially when your selling productivity related tools to businesses who are less likely to have upgraded beyond IE8 (statistically speaking).

I like the idea of putting product before business, but I can't see Google being the kind of company to do that intentionally.

I would really like to know more about their internal reasoning that led to this decision.