I think Apple's philosophy here is to push all the expansion to external devices. The new Mac Pro has 6 thunderbolt 2 ports on it. I'd assume you could probably connect some extremely large and fast storage enclosures with that kind of bandwidth. A regular workstation will always be limited by the space available inside of it. Not with this.
I would be disappointed if you could not lock this new Mac Pro and bolt it to your desk.
I also bet someone already is drawing a cylindrical case that holds a few 3GB drives and connects to that Mac using Thunderbolt. Make the cable short and rigid and you get something inspired by the Petronas towers.
And if I had or planned to buy those 20 Thunderbolt devices, I think I would drill a hole in a desk, pull a Thunderbolt cable through, and hang the devices and the cabling under the desk surface
Alternatively, one could build a Cray-1 inspired enclosure by adding a small pedestal with 10 Thunderbolt devices in a circle around it; unfortunately, this machine does not have a thunderbolt connector at the bottom.
And now that I am throwing analogies around: this thing needs a handle on top: http://curta.org.
That 'no connector at the bottom' is a bad thing, by the way. I can't find any picture on apple.com showing this thing with power and display cables plugged in.
Finally, I hope they have tested this thing well for dust intake and overheating in the case people place objects close to it on their desk.
We do use fibre, but only in production deployments.
The secondary issue is "open holes". People like plugging stuff into their workstations. We can fix that with desk cages as well. There is a hole big enough to get your finger at the power button.
I think Apple's philosophy here is to push all the expansion to external devices. The new Mac Pro has 6 thunderbolt 2 ports on it. I'd assume you could probably connect some extremely large and fast storage enclosures with that kind of bandwidth. A regular workstation will always be limited by the space available inside of it. Not with this.