It's an interesting approach, though let's be careful about how we define scaling -- with "full ACID" there are always operations that will make the system go pear-shaped, no matter how cleverly designed the system is.
Personally: I like transactions, but I'm not in love with SQL; additionally I'd like to have the options of:
- deploying systems, or portions of a system, that continue working when widely distributed over cheap, unreliable networks and running on cheap, unreliable hardware.
- Support large datasets (more slowly) but pay $100/terabyte instead of $LOTS/terabyte.
Of course, everything has its downsides -- which is why my stated desire for a do-everything DB is a bit of a pipe dream.
So check out H-Store[1], now commercialized as VoltDB[2]. You get full ACID, while staying with SQL, but also extremely fast performance and near-linear scaleout.
In my own tests (on call completion, save record and debit customer balance), I was easily to push over 100,000 transactions/sec on a 3-server cluster (low end, sub-$1000 servers). This is while maintaining full ACID and using SQL.
1: http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/ 2: http://voltdb.com/