Or drop the barometer of the top of the building, and count how long it takes to reach the ground! Obviously a stopwatch would be nice, but it is not a necessity.

With Thunderbolt cables themselves costing $50 I don't think this will be an "incredible" impact. I predict it being the Firewire of the future: something that's great but not used much by the public. Just look at eSATA, which although its been around since 2004 you'd be hard pressed to even find an eSATA port on any mid to low end (i.e. not enthusiast) motherboard.

This would actually be the ideal situation to use a minicomputer such as Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/). If you want to get really cool, you could use E-Ink displays. Then, one Raspberry could run as many displays as you want because it would not have to update the displays constantly. Save energy too. I would load it up with a little Linux kernel and some programming in order that they could all be controlled over the network (even remotely!).