You are. This isn't ment to be a completely realistic project ready to be shipped, it's a glimpse of the future, or maybe an art project. I think it's wonderful to see out-of-the-box stuff like this appearing on Hacker News.
I think I agree. This camera is cute but this particular implementation has flaws -- that's what I said before and what I hoped would be my take-home message, and I guess I didn't highlight that enough. I certainly didn't intend, "oh, fix this before it goes into production!" or anything like that.
He's also a writer for Make: http://blog.makezine.com/author/makemattr/
I think the key is that he's one of those people who are experimenting with mashing up not only different technologies but also different generations of technologies.
I guess one could call this stuff "parlor tricks" as one other person said but I agree that it's totally within the spirit of hackernews.