@Rob Dobs
I think you are overthinking this - the real benefit would be to corporates and local government who want to pre-render presentations and tech drawings [product design etc] in near real time without splashing out on a quad processor, twin GPU box costing £5000 every two years - with the right pricing model, there's a pretty decent market there I reckon.
Think about it - you have a product you want to show off - you are short on funds. You can either pay £3000 for a mid level rendering station that will take a whole weekend to create a [possibly crap, and requiring another week of reworking] video, or you could pay £500 to rent CPU time for a week and have the results right back at you in hours...once you have paid the Autocad guru, natch.
IE I built a machine to render municipal developments, including traffic calming and road layouts, as they wanted to show a video of it to get funding to do the physical work. The machine cost over £2500 to build. Instead, they could have done the CAD work on a boggo workstation with a consumer GPU in it, and uploaded the animation details to a server farm for [one would expect] a lot less outlay and downloaded the resulting film in a low res to test it within an hour - rather then rendering the scene overnight, realising it had glitches/wrong angles, and doing it again - wasting time, and money.
Which is not to say that Pixar etc wouldn't be interested of course, but I think the mid-low level market would be a better one to aim at!
Interesting stuff.
Steven "misses building massively specced dual processor and monster GPU workstations for local authorities so he could test them with Battlefield 2" R