... it only lacks a good web browser.

I would get a low-profile micro-ATX, so I can still have cards in it : at least the sound card and then whatever current or future need.
no hardware dongles / external hardware, roomy for at least one 3.5 HDD and two 2.5HDD.

We'll engineer a very cheap, advanced bio nanotech super food that has the potential to replicate the device that generated it. We'll call that an "egg".

I assume the capsule is buried in the ground (perhaps TFA would tell me), that would probably be stable enough. Else, I'd look for a place people have been making cheese for centuries before active environment control systems.

It's worse than that. The Raspberry Pi doesn't come with a clock.

Intel acts weird with the "tray price", on CPUs that only OEMs can get e.g. core i7 4950HQ is officially at $623 but it is speculated the OEM doesn't pay as much.

It would be possible but very unlikely. A laptop with dual NIC and a serial port would be fun to some people I'm sure, but you won't find it even though it's trivial to make one. So the chance of seeing a laptop with that server CPU and mandatory external GPU are zero.

But very interesting is they announce support for 2.5 Gbps ethernet. That's like a little suprise, a workaround to the semi-failure of 10G gaining traction.
It can do 100 meters over CAT5e, from this old pdf http://www.ieee802.org/3/minut...

So, if it comes to fruition maybe 2.5 Gb does the trick and it could end up as a desktop/laptop standard (besides cooling, putting a controller on PCIe 1x 2.0 would be a no-brainer)

Support AMD : get a Xeon-D motherboard and add an AMD graphics card to it!

It's a "SoC" because the southbridge is integrated - with the northbridge also integrated but regular CPUs have had the northbridge for a while.
USB, SATA and wired ethernet are in there but if you check the article and pictures there's no GPU or wifi!

If your motherboard supports 200MHz FSB instead of 166 (which might be a big if) then the CPU should run at 1.9GHz, which should not be terribly hard at all. That sempron was a rather quite underclocked Athlon XP, probably so they call sell it a tiny bit cheaper.

I had flash player 11.2 running on a Pentium III. Alright, I've researched the issue and these dumb nuts dropped SSE from one 11.2.x.x release to another!
pitiful html5 performance matches what I've seen on another computer (VIA C7 at 1GHz, Windows 7). HTML5 video really has a hardware decoder in mind (cell phone hardware, recent GPU with recent and/or proprietary driver) or needs even more CPU brute force that flash did.

smtube player may be useful, it's a front-end to browse for youtube videos and then launch them in a video player (or to download them). I did not try firefox extensions much yet.

It's a conservative, "cover you ass" statement given that is not unreasoable considered the distro is meant for grandmas and joes not only computer geeks.
The dist-upgrade from Mint 16 to 17 I did went good : 99.99% of everything went perfect and eventless, except there were a couple blocking issues that required me to do some "sysadmin" work.
A "supported" upgrade from lenny to squeeze on a very simple desktop system required much more babysitting and pampering from me.

Now : what you miss is this is history, as Mint has concentrated on Ubuntu LTS and soon debian stable upgrades are now explicitly supported (if you start from Mint 17)

I've sort of liked conservatism on Electrolysis. Were it rushed there would have been much bitching about broken extensions and instability and especially, I'm not in a hurry to have it consume all CPU/RAM on every computer. We don't all have a low-powered quad core CPU and 8GB+ RAM, or have it on all computers.
If in fact you have an option to disable/enable it, that will be best. Or I'd like a limit on max RAM use.

It would be interesting to run it under a nested X server (Xephyr)

That's quite a dramatic bug, at worst semi-faulty hardware.

You might find dillo to be a fun browser, I've checked for CSS and it's easily disabled from the "tools" menu.
If you use Windows you have to (attempt to) build it for Cygwin and X11 (though using putty and Xming to run it from a tiny linux VM would be faster done nowadays)

I do miss the days it was able to login to forums (a decade ago)