There were multiple gifts, and one of them was a week of GA starting when you click the link. That is on purpose, and it's specifically because we want to give a gold account, not a medal that you can trade / sell. It is beneficial to us to be able to have the impact be immediate both on the financial and the site side.

We are likely to continue doing it this way in the future.

[edit]

I just want to point out that I completely understand this suggestion and where it's coming from. Unfortunately when we give out weeks of free gold account time to thousands of users (this time more than ten thousand users) it is much better for us on the accounting side (and also for doing things like launching a new wardrobe for testing) to have it all go out at once.