You learn something every day, I had not realized that they moved the diode to the board. Great idea since that is what it protects anyway. Should make service that much easier not having to make sure you wire the coil properly. Not that its hard but one less thing to think about while repairing on route can be a good thing. The only drawback is that where before you always got a new diode installed at the same time as coils, now it will be quite a bit harder to replace... But away from the harsh coil they probably won't need replacement nearly as frequently.
Also, the purpose of the diode is not to protect the coil which electricly isn't much more than a long piece of thin wire tightly wound together and does not care which way the current flows. The diode is there because when the coil's magnetic field collapses it produces an electric current that without the diode would be free to travel back up to the driver boards electronics thereby frying them. The job of the diode is to block that.