From a manager perspective, this sort of alert (as well as recent Heroku emails telling you specifically which app(s) needed patching for the recent Rails CVE issues) is a great example of one of the extra benefits of Heroku. A team of engineers 'watching your back' at no extra charge is a good thing.
Agreed. I was surprised when I received an email from Heroku letting me know that a few of my apps needed to be updated after the Rails vulnerabilities were uncovered. They also named the apps that needed to be updated, which makes my job that much simpler.
I guess they had to build the feature. With the follow-on exploit for rails <3.1, the notification email went out very quickly and probably they will have quick notifications going forward.