The whole "prosumer" thing has been blurring the lines, typically to the detriment of the "pro" market, except for those "pro" markets that do not overlap with the consumer space whatsoever, e.g. heavy construction equipment.
I think Apple's philosophy here is to push all the expansion to external devices. The new Mac Pro has 6 thunderbolt 2 ports on it. I'd assume you could probably connect some extremely large and fast storage enclosures with that kind of bandwidth. A regular workstation will always be limited by the space available inside of it. Not with this.
Ours are locked into desks so they don't get nicked due to the high value nature of the work that is done on them.
Try locking a new Mac Pro, 20 dangling Thunderbolt devices and an iSCSI array into a desk.
You're going to end up with this as well:
I also bet someone already is drawing a cylindrical case that holds a few 3GB drives and connects to that Mac using Thunderbolt. Make the cable short and rigid and you get something inspired by the Petronas towers.
And if I had or planned to buy those 20 Thunderbolt devices, I think I would drill a hole in a desk, pull a Thunderbolt cable through, and hang the devices and the cabling under the desk surface
Alternatively, one could build a Cray-1 inspired enclosure by adding a small pedestal with 10 Thunderbolt devices in a circle around it; unfortunately, this machine does not have a thunderbolt connector at the bottom.
And now that I am throwing analogies around: this thing needs a handle on top: http://curta.org.
That 'no connector at the bottom' is a bad thing, by the way. I can't find any picture on apple.com showing this thing with power and display cables plugged in.
Finally, I hope they have tested this thing well for dust intake and overheating in the case people place objects close to it on their desk.
We do use fibre, but only in production deployments.
The secondary issue is "open holes". People like plugging stuff into their workstations. We can fix that with desk cages as well. There is a hole big enough to get your finger at the power button.
I also don't see how the machine you linked to supports "chuck another CPU in". It looks like it limits you to two, which is the same as the Mac Pro.
You can change the CPUs officially with the HP. I doubt Apple will offer that option.
My current "workstation" is configured with 2x 4 core Xeons, 32Gb of RAM, 2x Samsung 840's, a 5 drive SAS array, a 32Gb PCIe RAMdisk and 2 Quadro cards. That won't fit in the new Mac Pro...
If you could stick an engine from a MAN Support Vehicle[1] in a Toyota Prius, it doesn't make it a MAN Support Vehicle...
[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/billkatygemma/6281032897/
Edit: in context the cowardly parent poster suggested that because it has a Xeon E5 in it, it isn't consumer junk.
Innovation is not something I really want in the workstation market.
I want something utterly reliable that works flawlessly for several years and if something goes wrong I can swap the bits out in minutes. If I need more disks, just throw them inside it without playing around with half knackered frayed cables, external enclosures, power management and cable routing, volume management etc. More RAM? chuck it in. More CPU, chuck another CPU in.
Apple aren't offering ANY of that.
To be honest, neither Alienware or Razer are even workstation class machines either.
People have a low expectation of the term "workstation" these days.
Citation:
http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/workstations/z820_...
Edit: will the "downvoters" please bother to stop and explain what their idea of a workstation is?