Something smells off with this - grant to fund travel to meeting, if you use Roche technologies

Just got this email from Roche announcing a grant program to pay registration and travel fees for the AGBT meeting if you are using Roche-454 sequencing or Roche-Nimblegen arrays as part of your work (see below).  Seems like this would have some of the same conflict of interest issues as a pharma company paying someone to give a talk.  I note - I participated in a session supported by 454 at a meeting but paid my own way to avoid this type of conflict of interest issue.  Anyone have opinions on this?  Is this a common pharma method creeping its way more and more into genomics?