It'll probably fall apart in heavy dust environments, but most things do anyway.

To quote the pdf:

"""Rotation of the heat sink at several thousand rpm also provides a potent remedy to the longstanding problem of heat exchanger fouling. Consider for example the CPU cooler shown in Figure 1. The finned, metal heat sink cannot be seen because it’s covered in dust. But the fan blade, which operates in the same environment, is for all intents and purposes perfectly clean. This contrast in dust accumulation is at first startling, but in hindsight entirely expected. The air bearing heat exchanger therefore provides a complete solution to the problem of performance degradation due to heat sink fouling. In specialized applications involving extremely high particle loading, a straight-radial rather than backward-swept fin design would likely be used [Bleier, 1997]."""

I'm not exactly sure how transmitting heat across the gap would work. I imagine it would just be by convection, but I don't know how efficient that would be.

That said, I imagine that this type of design would be problematic in laptops. With the spacing so tight, it seems to me that any shocks to the fan could result in the vanes touching the baseplate.

As the metal blades spin, centrifugal force kicks up the air and throws it up and outwards, much like an impeller, creating a cooling effect.

I had to read that part twice too, but it sounds like the air cushion is only there initially, but gets sucked out when the fan spins. (That said, if it leaves a vacuum, that doesn't sound great for conductivity either...)

So like current tech = chip -> heatsink -> fan whereas this = chip -> magic spinning heatsink