Yeah, not new at all. I guess if you want to be able to see some text on the button when you press it, there no real better way to do it... you wouldn't want your entire remaining toolbar buttons to shift to the right to make space for the child buttons label to show right? And showing it ~below the button like a menu expansion popup would probably just look weird as well.
It's still something that catches me up every so often, but for my money - I'd much rather see GPSoft work on making buttons inherit their label settings from their parent toolbar (or parent button in three-buttons or menu button scenario)...