Picked up this comment on Tim's blog
personal fabrication, ubiquitous sensors and controllers, and the various explorations of makers at the macro level, designers starting to think about physical computing, and you see a future in which objects are infused with computing, and the boundaries between hardware and software start to blur
I couldn't agree more with this more. This is one of the areas which we touched upon at EuroFoo'04 and further talked about at EuroFoo '06 / Euro Oscon, when we covered the commoditisation of the manufacturing process and its distribution.
There is some really interesting work starting to happen in this area these days.
Why spime script? Well it's all about malleability and the division between software / hardware. Both divides break down to instruction sets (one for physical, one for digital) that interact to create the function of the Spime.
The choice of what is physical / digital is a fertile ground for a compiler, hence allowing the formation of a new language which compiles down not to hardware or software but both.