As for the 6 15Mbps connections those were just arbitrary numbers I picked. I'm currently stuck with sucky slower connections which is what I'm using it with. And DSL not cable. I'm not sure what you say about cable is true though since most cable modem speed cap is on the modem itself not at the ISP. At least that used to be the case. Also if you were using different ISPs that wouldn't be an issue, as long as they aren't sharing their network.
In terms of the pure linux routing solution, that is pretty interesting... Does it require that the remote machine has two physical interfaces or could you do the same with virtual interfaces like eth0:0 and eth0:1. Either way there are a few drawbacks with that solution. It will send 100% of your traffic through it rather than being able to selectively proxy. Also it only round robins so there is no intelligent load balancing as there is in tunnel splitter.