I'm actually amazed that this is just now getting press. This idea has been around for a while and was supposed to be the industry's segway into SSDs for everybody. If they can make these affordable, and put a good amount of flash on the drives, I see the potential for this to be a successful product. I think that SSDs are still the future, but prices are still astronomical compared to platter based storage.
I do think things need to change a bit, but we're on the right path. The first problem with Seagate's solution is that it has a measly 4GB of NAND flash, so things like games, most applications and other things don't stand to see a real benefit over time. On the desktop side, I think it'd be cool to see a 64GB of NAND flash strapped to a 2TB hard drive, or something like that. With that, a lot more could be accelerated, as it were, while storage stuffs would remain in the storage part of the drive. Even things like games, if used all the time, could be shifted over to the NAND for quicker access.
Something like 64GB would add about $100 to the drive, and would be worth it overall I think. NAND will always be more expensive than mechanical storage, and even if we have 500GB drives, it sucks to think a lot of it will be used for storage, which is something we certainly don't need huge speeds for.