He's right - this is definitely where the network needs to go. When we can manipulate network topology as easily as we can provision cloud-based servers today, we'll unimaginably more flexible than we are today.
Virtual topology. Someone is still running cables at the end of the day. And fat switch fabrics have some scary cabling indeed.
I was able to see a preview of the latest OpenStack a friend of mine has running on his cluster and was quite impressed where they are at currently. Although I would much rather see solid API and have communities (or startups) build products on top barebones installations like this.