From https://www.suse.com/c/at-suse-we-make-choice-happen/ "It goes without saying that SUSE remains fully committed to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) solutions as well as the openSUSE Linux distributions."

As a long term Leap and Tumbleweed user, I trust the openSUSE community to keep producing a nice distro.

Would a migration path be feasible, the fork getting some "stuff people coming from openSUSE would need" added/ported? Then it might effectively be as much a merge as a fork. Of course if that did happen, I'd expect the "people" in "stuff people need" to be specifically the subset who happen to be paying customers. Not sure if there are many users left outside that subset?

+1. Will they compete with there own products?

Whether you pay the for SLES or their fork of RHEL probably does not make much a difference to them. And for customers who run both SLES and RHEL (not sure if that is a common scenario, though), having a single vendor to a deal with is probably a plus.

SUSE liberty linux already existed for a while now, so it's nothing new.

It’s a funnel, and a darned good one.