On a tangent, I really hope that Minecraft helps encourage people to go into hardware. Or at least helps people understand a bit more about real world hardware and logic.
It helped me greatly. Even just learning how to build an SR-NOR latch for a redstone-operated door was awesome. I planned to try building a calculator, or even doing nand2tetris, but I don't have the time.
Arduino and Launchpad helped me too. I expect to see custom Minecraft maps made of a small microprocessor -- with some way of loading the same code on both the game's microprocessor and the real-world microprocessor, and watching the code function both ingame and in the real world simultaneously. Serial logging could even be used to maintain concurrency between the microprocessors.
(http://www.reddit.com/r/trueminecraft/)