That was his first mistake, :-) I like arduino for fast, quick and dirty stuff, but for a finished product, I'd rather try to do a closer to bare metal implementation. But otherwise, very cool project.
I've seen some non-programmer _artists_ get Arduino stuff working---barely---which is awesome! If they'd had to start by figuring out how to get a cross-compiler working (especially on Windows), they'd probably have given up.
Well, this was your first mistake :-) One of the pictures [0] in his series clearly shows that this is not a finished product. This is definitely a side/weekend project.
Agreed on being a cool project.