There's a missing piece here. You'd need a way to go from the 1-gige interfaces that commodity hardware can keep up with to the 10gige-plus interfaces that the backbone requires.
Or you could stick with 1G circuits and rely on wavelengths and laying more fiber to take up the slack. Not to mention the fact that commoditization of the infrastructure allows more backbone networks to be built. This is definitely not an instant revolution, just a way to evolve the network in a different direction. And I do think that a company trying this will need electronics engineers who can design innovative hardware as well as just assembling cards and boxes from the open market.
And too, the notion of a Linux routing cluster is undeniably hot. :)
Yep. --Michael Dillon