He did it in a hotel room in a foreign country. He, Tarnovsky, Nohl and Goodspeed just blow my mind.

Things like the ZINC by Xilinx are working its way into things like the Red Pitaya[1] which is absolutely remarkably capable for the price range, but yeah FPGA's are pretty niche for the common end-user. Lithography on sil wafers ends up being cheaper at nearly any scale. It turns out more economical just to do that one of those cheap FPGA-to-ASIC conversion dealies (rather than using Cadence or whatever VLSI tooling you have to DFM from the start [I think UC Berkeley has a full architecture/RTL/logic/circuit/physical kit]) at the threshold of around a few thousand units.

[1] http://store.redpitaya.com/red-pitaya-board-36.html