By pure chance I just spoke to the guys who made it at Maker Faire. Very cool project.

They told me they have the full system running with zero binary-only blobs. I think that alone can be quite a selling point nowadays...

It's... "closely coupled with a Xilinx FPGA. It's designed for users who care about Free Software and open source, and/or want to modify and extend their hardware: all the documentation for the PCBs is open and free to download, the entire OS is buildable from source, and it comes with a variety of features that facilitate rapid prototyping."

More than enough reasons for me. I'd buy one in a heartbeat, if I weren't broke right now.

I found a page where someone made a case on why it might make sense to fund the project and buy novena system. Here it is: http://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop

Exactly what I thought as well.