If I'm not mistaken, the money you are speaking about was $500 million that Sun spent in development of Solaris 10 - not x86 for the desktop.
About the "closed sources" you mention, I'm sure that is code originally licensed from AT&T Unix code and now owned by Oracle. I don't have any specifics, but BSD went through the same thing in the early 90s and because of the lawsuit, they ended up rewriting AT&T code. This is presumably what illumos will do with their code, or they might take BSD code and use it modified or unmodified.
SmartOS is a great illumos distribution if all you want is a hypervisor. A number of former Sun employees are now working for Joyent, who created SmartOS, such as Bryan Cantrill and Brendan Gregg.
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