Considering all the media coverage listed at the end, I'd say the copper foam was an effective marketing gimmick, enough to have actually funded the project were they not frozen. After that they could have run with the money or tried to implement it. If they had tried to implement it they would have eventually fallen back to reference boards or commodity parts in a slightly larger size, and probably just had the hardware clock down when overheated due to the badly designed heat sink, so I think they could have delivered. There are successful companies out there that rely on marketing gimmicks, like Bose.