It's just sandboxing taken to the extreme. The idea of freestanding (meaning requiring nothing more than the hardware to run) applications isn't anything new, in fact it's how all old applications worked! And doing it this way gives you a lot more control over the execution environment. Though, from a certain point of view it's starting to look more and more like we're just making an operating system who's components are separated by IP address space instead of traces through silicon.
