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It almost certainly saves space as the odd placement would be to optimize signal routing. You need a fair amount of space around a BGA to fan out all the signals, and at $20 they certainly have tried to do this with the minimum number of PCB layers possible which makes the routing problem much harder.

That being said it does look really strange.

I wondered that too. But turning them might make shorter data lines, which incur less capacitance and less crosstalk. They also might have avoided a bunch of 90-degree elbows.

Using 90 or 45 angles is a restriction on your design, not a feature. Also, it would be naive to assume that they dropped those constraints just for the lulz.

It looks wrong, particularly since for DDR3 signaling there are typically very strict design recommendations for the placement of the memory chips in relation to the CPU.

It also seems to work, so maybe the recommendations are just that.