Man, that is pretty crazy. Ctrl+Alt+* and the whole screensaver goes away just like that and everything on the workstation is accessible. Glad this vulnerability is getting more attention; I think it's obvious the feature should only be enabled in debug builds.
It's pretty obvious that it wasn't intentional. Or rather, that there was some miscommunication. Someone added a debugging feature that gets rid of programs that have grabbed the screen, and which is enabled by mapping some key combination to a function. They probably realized this was dangerous to enable generally. Someone else saw the recommended key combination and packaged it for general distribution, not realizing that it was a dangerous function that shouldn't be mapped ordinarily.