No amount of these gimmicks will turn folks on to non-iOS devices if their friends/families/social circles are using iPhones. Messages, photo sharing, and the close paring with Apple devices is too much to walk away from.
I LOVE Jeff's work and I own his Ansible book. The setup is pretty awesome. FWIW I think you could do this with local VMs a little more easily and provision with Vagrant. Having said that, a cluster of Pis is super fun!
That's a smart take. Even today when I'm learning something new I try to do as much physical typing as possible from the example because I feel like I learn it better.