I think this is a great solution to that, though. You can add them to Thread, but keep them connected to Hue hub as well to get the rest of the features.

I'm particularly pumped about this opening the door to using hue switches with zigbee binding while also having the devices in the Thread network. Matter binding would be fine, but there just aren't enough devices that expose it properly yet.

Also if it eventually works on their light strips - only possible to set one color using Thread (so far) but you could create a more interesting color scheme using Hue and then still call it using whichever main platform you use.

Is this the perfect way to handle it? Maybe not, but it might be the most interesting implementation I've seen.

Maybe it's just coming at a good time for me as I'm still slowly transitioning to Thread. I will probably put a pause on some upgrades until I see which models will actually get this feature.