Of course. They're not trying to make it impossible to detect IE. They're trying to make sure that all the "IE mode" quirks and workarounds out there in the wild don't get triggered on IE11 and break things.
Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko and they want to take advantage of all the standards-compliant layouts that developers are producing. But the only way to do that is to break with the past and not support all the madness inherited from legacy IE versions.
Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko and they want to take advantage of all the standards-compliant layouts that developers are producing. But the only way to do that is to break with the past and not support all the madness inherited from legacy IE versions.