Yes, from a performance standpoint there's no reason to go after this type of system. No one is arguing this is a good system for production work.
The application of this is a teaching model. It's a lot easier to demonstrate parallelism gains on this type of platform. Scaling beyond a single ARM core is going to give you immediate performance benefits. Scaling further out to the entire cluster will continue to show returns.
With a single desktop, once you go beyond ~4 cores the gains will drop off too quickly. You just won't be able to see gains out to 64 threads on a single CPU, where on this you should.
It also doesn't hurt to have a quirky architecture to get students excited by. And yes, you could also spend some time discussing the architectural trade-offs and why this is not a cost-effective system for production use.
Click the arrow that is to the left of the commenter's name. It seems you are one of today's lucky 10,000: http://xkcd.com/1053/
I made a bad assumption because your account is almost one year old. I'm sorry. Now I see that information is not given anywhere in this site. I think this vote method was taken from Reddit.
There are no practical applications to this, it's just to show that it can be done.
You can spawn 64 processes in a Core I7 and it would be about the same, just faster. Or 64 VMs.
Maybe the real value of these systems is to teach students to design and calculate before building it.