Exactly. I saw this back when it was relatively new, at EuroSys 09, and it seemed very smooth, very neat, and very much not what I'd want on anything mission-critical.
The most valuable thing I took out of it was that it is a good lesson in marketing a product. I mean, the tech itself obviously took a lot of work, but it doesn't really attack what people doing dynamic upgrade consider hard problems -- in particular, it doesn't do changes to data very well.
However, look at the way it was presented. Firstly we get good stats to the effect that the vast majority of kernel updates are things that can be done without solving difficult data update problems. This was a particularly important point to make at a research-related conference.
But the marketing doesn't stop there -- they also run a service which you can use to generate updates for you, so you can track from kernel to kernel automatically.
So, the end result is a strong argument for something which a) works most of the time; b) will work for you without much effort on your part; and (most importantly) c) is fantastic bragging rights: "My OS doesn't ever need rebooting!"
In the wrong hands, this would have been a mediocre research project. "Sure we can upgrade the kernel, but we have to interpose functions, create shadow data structures, the result isn't anything like what a "real" kernel would look like after reboot so you have no guarantee of anything, and sometimes it doesn't work". Instead we get something that everybody is talking about and is rapidly emerging as a strong selling point for Linux. My respect to the KSplice team for doing three jobs well: research, implementation, and marketing.