After speaking with the developer, the change was intentionally done in order to solve several other outstanding issues where getting a control polygon back when requesting the mesh was not ideal and unexpected. The SubD Control Polygon component should be used instead for this purpose.
Additionally, we are going to make the change that was suggested by @martinsiegrist to the SubD to Mesh component and make Level 0 return the control polygon as well. To me this seems like a great addition.