(One would think hoop-snaking would be a more popular method of locomotion amongst the linear crowd.)
(This one even has a punchline of sorts.)
So yeah, it looks like we're well on our way to utility fog! ... okay, we've got a ways to go yet. But you don't need utility-fog capabilities for commercializability; I'd love to have, say, furniture or made out of tens or thousands of centimeter-size versions of these. Or make the non-load-bearing walls of a house out of tens of millions of them. (Never mind blurring the line between architecture and interior decoration — just imagine never worrying about finding a nearby power outlet again!)
Offhand (i.e. without doing any research and all off the top of my head) it looks like the major barriers are miniaturization and power-supply. Power might not be as much of a problem: the smaller (and therefore more numerous-per-volume) they are, the less force they should each have to exert; but there will be both "bending energy" and "bonding energy" to consider, and while the former I think is line-cube, the latter seems to be at best square-cube, not as amenable to reduction as the first. (Centrifugal force and gravity are harsh taskmasters; the first can be reduced, with some cleverness, but the second is quite inescapable.) Still, it's probably not a significant problem at all for the housewalls version, though room-temperature superconductors would probably be nice there.
On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, miniaturization of sufficiently powerful motors to the millimeter scale is just not something we know how to do. (This recent motor is about two orders of magnitude insufficiently powerful.)
(Edit 2009-02-20: fixed formatting.)
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