It's a shame there aren't more Computer Engineers on HN. I deployed a NIOS processor to an Altera dev board for my design project and it worked very nicely. I'm constantly amazed at how powerful FPGAs are getting and how configurable they are. Programmable hardware truly is the hotness.
We are here. I have a feeling we just tend to be a bit more quiet than our web brethren. Glad you like the Nios. I worked on SOPC Builder and a bit on the Nios for a while. It's definitely some of the most exciting things we do at Altera.
My hope is that the Xilinx embedded ARM devices and tools end up being more affordable than their PPC hard cores.