Personally, I think this raises a few questions, and I'd like to think that among them would be "how do we level out the playing field for the other six counties?" One way to do this would be to invite over the three inter-provincial teams from Ireland, the Leinster Lightning, Northern Knights, and North West Warriors. This would benefit everyone, giving the Irish players first-class experience and the English players their warm-up games. It would also be a useful tool to measure the quality of the interpro teams compared to full-strength or near full-strength counties. It might even be possible to get the county-contracted Irishmen back to play for their provinces for a couple of games, giving the Irish selectors a place to compare them with one another.
Of course, there is also the question of whether these games are really necessary. The Sheffield Shield doesn't have its own version, and the Australians just whitewashed England in the Ashes. There have been some fiercely strong MCCU/UCCE teams in the past, such as Loughborough's inaugural first-class eleven, but the standard has waned somewhat, and is now probably a bit below Australian First Grade cricket. It is easy to make a case that these games are obsolete and just burden an already heavy county schedule; a statistic to back that view is the collective Cambridge batting average of 9.75.
To be honest, though, I like these games a lot, even if there are a couple of nonsensical aspects to the way they are scheduled. For me, the most sensible solution is to welcome the Interpro teams briefly into the English season, and with first-class status. This means that the MCC Universities each get their two first-class games, the counties each get a first-class warm-up, and a third party gets a little bit of benevolent help too.
So why couldn't it happen? Because the ECB has plunged far too much cash into the MCCU coaching budgets to share any of the fixtures with scary subversive outsiders, and Cricket Ireland probably wouldn't want to risk promising talents being plucked straight out of the Interpros and into the county second teams.