This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, considering what Google has said in the past. At least in my opinion, search will evolve from showing results to answering questions, and that was the point of the Knowledge Graph from the start.
When you think about the goal of search engines, it is to directly provide the user with what they are looking for as quickly and painlessly as possible. In situations where they are looking for information, Google would of course want to directly display that information to the searcher instead of making them click through different results trying to find what they are looking for. If it wasn't for the fact that this is a fairly hard thing to accurately do, Google would have been doing this years ago.
It might be unfortunate for websites, but as Eric Schmidt said, Google exists for users and not for website owners.
When you think about the goal of search engines, it is to directly provide the user with what they are looking for as quickly and painlessly as possible. In situations where they are looking for information, Google would of course want to directly display that information to the searcher instead of making them click through different results trying to find what they are looking for. If it wasn't for the fact that this is a fairly hard thing to accurately do, Google would have been doing this years ago.
It might be unfortunate for websites, but as Eric Schmidt said, Google exists for users and not for website owners.