I actually think the idea of a piezo pickup for midi out is awesome. I have a magnetic pickup that I will be using for a guitar that I am specially building for it. The real advantage to midi is when you are a one man guy trying to record an album and you don't have the time to learn how to play keyboards and all of the other instruments you may need, especially if you are doing something complex like progressive metal, where each part can have very difficult parts to them. The automatic tuning seems like a nice idea, but it would be helpful if you could save your own setups (tune the guitar to standard E with a set of .010's save that as a patch, then drop D it, save as another patch, etc, etc. If you put on different strings (.009's or .011's for example) you'd have to redo it all over again, but since there's 500 configs you could have them set per string set. Needless to say I do play guitar. Seems like alot of potential with this... better than the Yamaha G10 concept from the 80's anyways!
And to the guy saying about pickups, it may be possible to put in your own pickups. It seems like everything is done in a converter, so the pickups are probably the stock crap Gibson ones.