It would have been a bold move, if Damien had left the "Couch" name with Apache CouchDB, and released his CouchBase product under another name. Also, this would have liberated him from having to distance himself from CouchDB, Erlang and Apache, when promoting his new product.
I agree with what I think that you and other people here are saying: the Apache CouchDB project will continue to be supported by a good community so there is very little technical risk for using CouchDB. BTW, I think that datastore as a service companies like Cloudant, MongoHQ (and many other good companies) are a great convenience, but for self hosting, I wonder why anyone really needs support for CouchDB, MongoDB, etc. unless they have very large deployments.
I think it's a little unfair to lump Cloudant in with MongoHQ and label them a "datastore as a service" company. You should check out what they've done with BigCouch and their annoucement today about how they will be committing the BigCouch changes back into CouchDB proper.
CouchDB is dead, long live Apache CouchDB.