[jwfergus]

The asynchronous aspect of this is a big deal. It makes life both easier (because components can continue to run without blocking on data) but introduces complexity (sometimes you /need/ to synchronize). I've recently been working on a research project where this difference became very apparent. If you're working with wall-clock time (and especially any deadlines) the synchronization between different processes can subject you to needing a real-time operating system. At the very least (without deadlines) you're going to be doing some semaphore coding which can be difficult to scale.

On a related note: I look forward to the new Intel Haswell architecture. Built in HW Transactional Memory!!! Hurray!