It's got nothing. The mail application was a (relatively) thin client to a service that ran on AWS, and that service was shut down in January. The idea is that you'd write your own embedded code to make the device cool.
We still run the cloud-based mail service; these devices stopped working because of plumbing stuff mostly. There are tons of devices with thin clients hitting the cloud -- that's actually what we spend all our time on these days...
But you are right about what someone would try to do with it
I posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544436 with a bit more info on the hardware.