It is new to C#, which is slowly catching up to Scala and F# in that regards. Mads Torgesen is good friends with Martin Odersky, in fact, when I first met Mads back in 2006 or so, they were talking about adding pattern matching to C#. C# is a much more conservative language, and it makes sense it would take a while to add.
There are good reasons to use C#, so when it gets a new feature that other languages have had for years, well, it is newsworthy.
There is a paper, Pizza into Java: Translating theory into practice, from Odersky and Wadler at POPL 97 about how to mix generics, lambda and pattern matching in a Java like language.
There are good reasons to use C#, so when it gets a new feature that other languages have had for years, well, it is newsworthy.
Now when will javascript get pattern matching?