Perseverance and stamina are rare qualities, and that gorilla is a very nice work of art. A ported BF chess engine not so much. Now, a C-to-BF compiler would be interesting.

The recent "X in pure CSS" theme is important as it shows how advanced CSS3 is. They are tech demos, which as we know are often not meant to be anything more than that. They display how far you can bend CSS and nothing more. Just like the Blendtech ads, if someone cut down a tree with a pocket knife in an afternoon I bet 1/2 of us would run out to buy that knife.

If an artist had done this using more standard tools and rendered it as SVG no one would care. I think you've completely missed the point.

edit: It seems that psadauskas made this point some time ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1428943