Great post. I would have kudo'd it were I not so annoyed with having been tricked by the kudo button's hover-for-irrevocable-action on another article in the past.
I went back to see what you were talking about and now I'm in the same boat as you. I think it's a good opportunity for another cool effect though. I imagine you could hover (after "kudoing") and the animation would happen in reverse resulting in an "un-kudoing".
Meh, the effect is trivial and the behavior is bad. The real opportunity is to just fix it.
Isn't it a fairly meaningless metric, though? I don't give much credence to the fact that n people gave the article 'kudos' - Dustin is already a trusted reader for most of HN.