Ok. And this flexibility is only really possible since they did a lot of work to make external and internal tables roughly equivalent in performance.

Yeah, performance depends.

I think a hybrid approach works best (store on Snowflake native and iceberg/tables where needed), and allows you the benefit of Snowflake without paying the cost for certain workloads (which really adds up).

We're going to see more of this (either open or closed source), since Snowflake has acquired Crunchydata, and the last major bastion is "traditional" database <> Snowflake.

They didn't do it out of good will. They realized that's where the market was going and if their query engine didn't perform as well as others on top of iceberg, then they'd be another Oracle in the long-term.