Well they rather cheaply added on a currency that made no sense, which they issued to themselves and force people to use (or at least hold) to participate in the protocol. If it was open source from day one, the very first thing anyone would do would be to remove XRP.
XRP exists to help protect the Ripple network by making it costly to mount an attack against the network.
The drama that took place earlier this year when there were several denial of service attacks against Mt. Gox, causing the price of BTC to drop so that it could be bought cheaper by the attackers and their friends is way less likely to happen to Ripple.
Unlike transfering BTC, sending XRP from one Ripple user to another is free and confirmation is instant—no need for miners to confirm the transaction.
There are so many other, better ways to solve that problem which don't involve an unnecessary transfer of wealth to OpenCoin Inc. Also, I wouldn't even call it a solution: it makes opening accounts costly, which directly hampers scalability and eliminates entire classes of use cases. That's a weakness, not an advantage.
There may very well be better ways. But creating a distributed p2p exchange protocol is probably a lot harder to do than some of the people raising funds and making promises would have you believe.
So am I surprised? No.