The addition is a big plus I think and hopefully the 5 gift limit a day and rotating collectors item are ideas to be used for the future (maybe even April in post??)
a) New players can now get decent cash for the 3g collectable items to help them start off
b) Means the perma have a true source of getting the consumable titles without having to just go mad on weekends
c) Controls the prices of consumables in pre from going silly and hopefully discourages people from trying to buy off the unaware cheap to sell leter for much more.
Like Lindsay said, I expected this was one of the first additions that was made and well before any skill updates for the month would have been considered anyway. To suggest the skill updates were put back because of this is kind of silly.
It will be interesting to see the effect on the pre/post gold trades by this new npc.