It is backwards and naive to think that desktops are just fine, and computer programmers are historically the last to understand and embrace change (now here is where we could put some Alan Kay quotes, I'll start with his exasperation at our lack of a real CAD system for programming)
> "we would have something like what other engineering disciplines have in serious cad system, a serious simulation of the cad designs and a serious fab facility, to deal with the real problems of doing programming. Ivan [Sutherland] just jumped there [with sketchpad]." [1]
So lets talk about the interesting features he presented, and do ourselves the service of learning from this work.
Panels: Top to bottom for content is DIFFERENT THAN ALL MAINSTREAM OSes. He is lamenting permanent status bars, the windows ribbon, the chrome tab bar and more with this feature. And he goes on to explain alternate features to replace that functionality he moved for this goal of more vertical space. He also displayed a number of situations regarding navigation through panels which seem well designed. He factors in pinning an active window and the ability to scroll among others, and minimizing windows to reinforce spatial memory and leave breadcrumbs. He also accounts for resizing windows.
See the new c2 federated wiki for interesting uses of vertical space and breadcrumbs [2].
Tags: As another user mentioned in the comments, a lot of work has gone into the study of PIM, and tagging is quite effective. Of the three (search, hierarchy, tag) none is found to be best, but the availability of all three is important. This project does us the service of reminding us that we are generally missing that third option. This system offers all 3 options. (I'm sorry I can't find my source right now).
Search: Across all elements of personal computing (email to tabs to applications to files) is an interesting idea. Yes omniboxes have been around forever and will be, but this project pushes the idea that there are even more hooks to toss into that system.
Gaze: This is fantastic, and there are limitless opportunities. Of course its not a silver bullet, you wont be taking my tiling wm keyboard controls away from me (see that Onion video on the keyboardless apple) and obviously I don't think that way. But there are cool interactions that very few people if any have had the ability to come up with on gaze augmented PC systems.
Touch: Everyone is saying that tiling wm controls are way better. Of course they are. What percentage of PC users have tiling wms? Lets just round down to 0%. This brings that kind of efficiency to users which would otherwise never have it.
I appreciate the commentors who have looked at this project and reflected on it. I learn a lot from and really enjoy reading hn especially for the comment threads, I hope I can pay it back some with this.
[1]: https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY?t=1962
[2]: http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors
E: This thread got a LOT better since I posted and refreshed the page. Thank you all.