There has been some clarification:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1683968,00.asp.

However, this doesn't mean that the SuSE Linux Professional desktop is going to become a community supported Linux distribution the way Fedora is, said Kevan Barney, Novell's senior manager of public relations. The "Fedora comparison was strictly related to target market," he said.

The messages are a bit mixed and I suspect that's because the people promoting the business desktop version want to differentiate it as strongly as they can from the box, because they know that in reality the difference is not all that great. Instead of worrying about that they should set the price of maintenance / support for the commercial version as realistically (i.e. low) as possible. The important thing about Linux on the desktop at the moment is getting more "market share" and making it an acceptable and unsurprising thing to do for business.