Well yeah, but the comparisons here are not just shipping the drive.
The original one is shipping an SSD and binning it at the destination, and this one is taking the plane with your drives and binning them when you're done.
When I was interviewing a founder at SpiderOak, he mentioned that they did this for some bigger clients (complete with zero-knowledge encryption) to get them up and running faster.
It is likely that this will be true for some given quantity of data for a long time.
But in Canada, the quantity of data required to make the mail look like a good option has just plummeted. It may be cheaper to mail a DVD+R for as little as 1GB of data. That's just not very much data anymore. Google offers Gmail users more storage than that for free.
AWS has their import/export tool that does just this: http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/
There's also the story of the carrier pigeon which was faster than broadband in South Africa http://www.physorg.com/news171883994.html
Fill a 737 with bluray, fly it from NY to LA, and you'll reach 37,000 Gbit/s.
It's called Sneakernet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet