I think it's interesting because of the notion of having some sort of Chef or other configuration management on Github, and then being able to fork that for particular development purposes or preferences and switch between them. I gather from some of the other interviews that the sputnik project is aiming for something like that.
As far as hardware goes, I like Lenovo ThninkPads best, and the Dell E65xx series that kind of copy them are also pretty good. I expect to screw around googling driver settings and etc on any new hardware I buy, so I'm not to worried about "just working". Someone else's definition of everything "just working" probably isn't good enough for me anyway.
Running clones of specific production environments in a VM is a good idea, using it as your main everyday interface is not, IMHO.