systemd to absorb cron next

As it should. Cron doesn't meausure up well in 2013. No way to detect job failures, establish job dependencies, or allocate processes to cgroups. In any important environment it's already been replaced with full-scale enterprise batch managment suites because basic cron is a liability.

Think of every "batch" out there implmented in cron with overly long timings between jobs, or hacked together with cron, shells, and lockfiles. There's a need for a serious cron replacement, and for a per-user daemon managment system. It looks like systemd is going to fill those shoes, which means they'll have a consistent interface and tools.