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Life forms on this planet had millennia to work out ways of combining otherwise-incompatible chemicals to support the engines of life. Life forms are a lot more than "eat food, burn energy, crap out leftovers"... they are incredibly intricate systems that use chemicals to create, stimulate or regulate other chemicals, and use proteins to alter chemicals into useful tools.
Arsenic might not "work" in terms of terrestrial life forms' life systems, but that doesn't mean arsenic couldn't be a "workable" part of the life system of some other organism. So this news doesn't surprise me a bit. It's actually similar to the discovery of microorganisms living in the deep ocean vents, using heat and incredibly volatile chemicals to create energy and sustain them.
The more we learn about life, the more we discover that it is much more diverse and robust than we give it credit for.
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