As a design asthetic I find it fairly interesting. By working toward a design managing the thermals in a way that allow for more heat removal while allowing it to not sound like a 747 on takeoff is good. I suspect your typical desktop machine will benefit from that kind of thinking.

Also for a long time Intel was trying to push all of the expansion boards outside the case with USB, and Apple seems close to achieving this with thunderbolt. Leaving the primary chassis as the system/holder for CPU+Memory+GPU with perhaps some boot media, and putting anything else outside.

I can't wait to see on in action to see how well this strategy works in practice vs in slideware.