Many friends of mine have tried to explain me what's so great about LINQ, but it never seemed that much impressive. The same with F#. Transactional NTFS flew completely under my radar, but it, too, doesn't look impressive the way, say, ZFS does.
I may sound harsh, but there is so much more going on that their contributions really feel underwhelming.
From what I can see, the transactions in ZFS and Transactional NTFS are completely different kind of things. The Transactional NTFS kind are distributed transactions of the kind you normally associate with database server and messaging systems like MQ - so your file IO can enlist in a transaction that touches a lot of different things.
Not saying it is a good idea - abuse of distributed transactions is a terrible thing, but I do think it is fairly innovative.
Being a bad idea kind of reduces the value of whatever innovation led to it. When you find something obvious nobody tried before, you should get suspicious.
Don't get me wrong. I am an engineer and I frequently answer a "why?" with "because it's cool" or "because it could be done", but with years of experience come a strong sense of what's a good idea and what's not and what you describe looks like a very bad one. And not even a lot of fun to implement.
I may sound harsh, but there is so much more going on that their contributions really feel underwhelming.