That's exactly what I'd like to do with it (although since I have a lot of hardware, I would also like Microsoft to fix its appalling Windows MIDI drivers, for God's sake). I don't see this being that affordable in the short term but I would absolutely love to work with something like this for both audio and video.

I think there'll be plenty of demand if they can bring it in at a competitive price and it's sufficiently responsive. Of course it will be in niche markets at first but I have no problem thinking of use cases. My day job is recording and editing sound for film and when your timeline runs to a couple of hours with maybe 40 active tracks (and that's on a small project) then even the best control surface has trouble keeping up, you keep having to switch channels or pages to deal with all the virtualized mixer controls, plugins and whatnot - not to mention that that amount of dedicated hardware costs a fortune. A table-sized work surface with a good haptic grammar would make that jobs vastly easier. I imagine the same is true for anyone working in VFX with its similarly elaborate pipelines.

There's a demo of Deadmau5 using a similar technology to control aspects of his set: http://www.wpcentral.com/deadmau5-teases-software-project-mi...