I think this was discussed on LWN; if you get the patches from Red Hat and redistribute them, Red Hat will cancel your service contract. So it could work, but only once.
That has been going on forever. I remember the days when Red Hat was shipping a "2.4" kernel that had all the features from 2.6 backported into it. They're still submitting the patches upstream, so if you want an "unobfuscated" kernel tree you can get it from Linus.
