TBL's proposal reminds me of OLPC Bitfrost, which blew me away in 2006 (?) when I first read about it (and OLPC was still hot.)
I don't actually know what became of it--unfortunately, I didn't yet get a chance to play with an OLPC device, and after they forfeit large parts of their vision in favor of a Microsoft-based solution I admittedly lost some of my interest--but at any rate, looking over the Bitfrost spec again today I think it is still relevant, and fairly close to what TBL has in mind:
I don't actually know what became of it--unfortunately, I didn't yet get a chance to play with an OLPC device, and after they forfeit large parts of their vision in favor of a Microsoft-based solution I admittedly lost some of my interest--but at any rate, looking over the Bitfrost spec again today I think it is still relevant, and fairly close to what TBL has in mind:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost