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My guess is that this is mostly an attempt at quality control on Amazon's part, and an accommodation to 'facts on the ground,' not at all an indication they are moving to ePub. They'd rather start with high quality ePub and convert these with in house tools (which they can control, refine and improve) than to insist that publishers do an inferior conversion to mobi before submitting it. Poorly formatted mobi files (and there are a lot of them in Kindle Store) are one of the weak points of the platform, and they need to be proactive about improving quality.
For some reason, Amazon's market share alone has not motivated widespread interest in authoring quality mobi files, and Amazon has certainly not provided tools for doing so (apart from their InDesign plugin, which is not really sufficient). Meanwhile, tools for producing ePub continue to proliferate and improve. There's no Kindle equivalent of ePubCheck, for example. There are no open source projects like Sigil to author Kindle ebooks, nobody is writing extensions for LibreOffice or MSOffice to export Kindle ebooks.
On the KDP side of things, the Kindlegen utility used to build ebook files has accepted ePub input for at least a couple of versions now. While the best results can still only be had by learning the details and limitations of mobi HTML tagging, Kindlegen now also embeds the source that was inputted to Kindle gen, whether that was a vanilla HTML file, mobi source, or ePub source. This gives Amazon more information about how formatting problems arise so they can improve their conversion tools.
As others point out, ePub support alone doesn't mean much to consumers unless Adobe DRM is part of the picture, since it is that which confers portability among the many reading systems that license Adobe's DRM solution. However, using Adobe DRM means sharing revenue with Adobe, which is why Apple chose to use their own DRM for iBookstore, and why Amazon isn't going to do it either, at least when they are doing so well without it. Plus Kindle platform is not just about a different format and DRM, there is a lot of existing infrastructure built up around it that can't easily be mapped to ePub and Adobe's solution, even if they wanted to.
What I would hope to see at some point is the ability to send ePub files to the free conversion service and have them converted to Kindle format using Amazon's best conversion heuristics. Hopefully they'll improve Kindlegen as well, so it identifies problems at the source (a la ePubcheck).
Ultimately Amazon needs to improve mobi so it offers formatting options that are equivalent to, if not identical with, ePub. Further convergence is not likely to happen unless and until DRM goes away.
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