Agreed, because you can't beat a Corley!

I didn't even watch the video, just looked at the pictures, and I think it's pretty hideous for something that was supposedly designed to be aesthetically pleasing. You flip it open, and you have this weird squareish bit jutting out the back. You close it, and the top surface of the laptop is disturbed by a fat hinge groove line running across it. Compare that to the MacBook Air, where the design is a true clamshell, no square protrusions at the back, and the hinges are relatively hidden underneath the unit, not apparent from a top view at all.

Credit to Dell for trying to move beyond the Heinous Grey Box school of design, but it's painfully obvious that they've got a ways to go. Normally I wouldn't care much about the aesthetic considerations since that's not a top concern of mine when buying new kit. However, when you specifically market your products based on their aesthetic merit, you'd better make sure they don't have serious aesthetic flaws.

which specific chips are effected?

No one knows for sure, and Nvidia isn't telling. The Inquirer says practically all of them, but their author has a history with Nvidia so there's quite a potential for bias there. The running theory is that the problem is due to thermal properties of a substrate material. This substrate material supposedly expands and contracts at a different rate than surrounding material in the chip package. Over time, this stresses the silicon or solder points, eventually causing a failure of the part. Laptop parts are definitely affected, you only need to look in notebook manufacturers forums and you'll see an incredible number of posts from owner of notebooks with, for example, 8600 GT mobile parts.

Desktop parts may also be affected, since they're all based on the same core silicon with (supposedly) the same substrate materials. It's possible that the problems aren't as apparent (at least not yet) due to the different thermal conditions you'd see in a tower chassis compared to a notebook. The very popular 8800GTs out there may start failing en masse in three months, six months, a year's time, or maybe never. Because Nvidia won't specifically say which parts are affected, whether it's all the parts or only certain manufacturing runs, etc., we have only speculation and rumor to go on.