I was thinking more along the lines of how current graphics ports are wired to the graphics chip. How would the mobo be designed to allow the GPU display output to any of the many LP (light peak) ports?
I guess it would be possible to just have the PCI-E card push the video back to the motherboard and have it available to output on any of the LP ports on the mobo. 1920x1200x36b (12b/channel) is 83Mb/s on a 5,000Mb/s PCI-E-2 x16 channel. 2560x1600x36b is 150Mb/s. Even quad 30" ACDs would be 600Mb/s. So as long as the PCI-E chipset (or CPU in the case of lynnfield) could handle pushing that much data back out to a LP port, it would be OK, your graphics card just wouldn't have ports on the back anymore (probably another win for Steve).
Isn't this was USB 3.0 was supposed to be? Fiber optic with copper for power? Then everyone got bent out of shape and it went back to another set of copper wires.
This seems like a great technology. I guess as long as the cables are robust and don't break easily it'll be fine. 10Gb/s is a ton of data to push around. No more need for docking stations, just your monitor that has speakers, USB, etc and the keyboard/mouse plugged into it. You set your laptop down, plug in one cable for LP and one for power and thats it. I don't see much use for it as an internal connector (e.g. SATA), but who knows, if SSDs bump up against the 600MB/s ceiling of SATA 6Gb/s quickly then it'll be on to move them to LP (1250MB/s, more than twice SATA 6Gb/s, yea I know, its because SATA uses 10/8 encoding to transfer a byte in 10 bits, that would probably go away with LP).
What becomes the bottleneck isn't the transfer medium (the cable and sender/reciever transceivers), rather the Intel and AMD IO chips - if they can manage to push around 50Gb/s throughout the system without issue and heavy CPU intervention (I'm looking at you USB). Intel's IO chips are already becoming saturated with multiple SSDs in RAID configurations.
Finally, I hope they can push more power down the pipe vs what they can with USB now - 5V at 500mA is kinda weak. A full 1A would provide for 5W of power - definitely enough to power a HDD. Maybe not at a full 100m, but for shorter cables (less than 5 feet) they should be able to push 5W.