@vincent correctly chided us for posting in the “about category” thread, so I’m moving my reply here.
I love the Rancher team for their technical chops in making Docker orchestration a a much simper affair than in any other environment… but marketing guru communicators they are not. Maybe that’s what I like about them. 
When we first heard the news about Rancher 2.0, we were panicking for the exact same reason. We tried Kubernetes with a very large scale proof of concept. We tried in GCP, in AWS, and in our own datacenter, but where did we land? With Rancher. Rancher just made more sense and made complex things simpler and “docker-like”. We’re not in production yet, but have invested heavily in Cattle, so when we saw the 2.0 plans saying “now it’s all Kubernetes”, our eyes went wide and I nearly threw my keyboard against the wall.
But, if I’m understanding things correctly, that’s not what’s happening. It’s still Rancher as we know it on the front end, the API, and the control mechanisms (docker-compose/rancher-compose/ rancher cli), but the underlying technology that’s deploying containers, handling networking, storage, etc.; that’s all Kubernetes.
Frankly, that’s not only “ok”, I think it’s great! From our point of view, this let’s the Rancher team focus on the things that made us select Rancher in the first place: the UX, API and control schemes are comprehensible and usable in ways that no other docker orchestrator are. Kubernetes on the other hand has a proven record with wide-scale adoption of it’s technical components. Best of both worlds!!
Re-read the second paragraph of the Announcement post (not just the first sentence):
With 2.0, Rancher now bases its architecture and every cluster/environment on Kubernetes. While 1.0 already supported installing, operating, and managing Kubernetes environments, we’ve always felt that it did not mesh with the rest of the Rancher user experience. In 2.0, we remedied that. Not only do you get access to the native Kubernetes dashboard UI and kubectl, but now the Rancher UX (CLI, API, UI, and Docker compose) works directly on top of Kubernetes. Think of 2.0 as an enhanced add-on to the Kubernetes platform where you can continue to use all of the existing Rancher features you know and love, along with leveraging the rich Kubernetes ecosystem and rapid innovations.