Even in the state shown, I saw alot of potential. A shame, indeed.
It had everything that the normal version had except for an audio driver. Thom had written a driver for the touch screen and case buttons, and it had a LED that could actually output RGB values that was controlled via some resource. It even had the emulator running, and it ran WBSteroids and SuperBase - you were a bit restricted to the software we had on the image since the CF and Memory stick interface didn't work yet.
It's hard to convey how cool it was to boot from the thing the first time and suddenly see a "Please insert volume Workbench" requester pop up, or the boing ball with animated floppy disk