It is a good way to spend the marketing budget
They could hire a marketing company and pay them a ton of cash, or just do it this way.
This way is much stronger, and they will limit the number of people who can get involved, i.e. get the free machine.
The cherrypal looks quite smart, and the cloud computing idea is going to be interesting as well. That is maybe where the speed claim is coming from. Processing shoved to the server. Really we are having the return to thin clients, or as I like to call them Lean Clients, or Fit Clients.
The servers probably won't be green in and of themselves, but overall they will produce a net green effect, allowing processing to be centrally managed, rather than having powerful processors consuming power, but being left idle.
A lot of good ideas in this little box of tricks.