Long time watchers of Disney will be a little less surprised at this news, than most. Star Wars has had a presence at the Disney parks for 25 years, through the Star Tours attraction. Since 2010 Disney has been rolling out a revamped version of the ride at its parks across the globe.
In addition to that relationship, this deal comes at a time when Disney has been increasingly acquisitions focused in the past few years. In particular they have been acquiring properties with IP that can work across movies, TV and theme parks.
In 2006 they grabbed Pixar, apparently because their Chairman was visiting a Disney park and noticed that the most popular characters in one of the parades, were all from Pixar movies. In 2009 they purchased Marvel, as part of an effort to broaden Disney's appeal to more boys. One of the perils of buying a company like Marvel, is that they may have already licensed their properties to rival studios and theme parks - that's why you will continue to watch Spider-man movies made by Sony, and enjoy an awesome Spider-man ride at Universal Studios Florida, for many years to come.
Naturally there are a lot of scare stories about the impact this deal will have on the quality of future Star Wars movies- but lets be honest, the prequels didn't exactly benefit on the quality front, from their currant owner. There was a similar level of apprehension when said Disney took control of Marvel, but the release of the very decent Avengers Assemble movie, this summer - should have allayed any fears of a potential disnification of Marvel product. There is no reason to suggest that an acquired Lucas Film will managed any differently.
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