What suprises me is the short lifespan of the product to the public before killing it. While some of us may have had Wave invites for a while, it has been only been open to the public for less then 3 months.
Ladyada's guide (http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/) has all of the basics to get you started with the physical parts of hooking up your Arduino.
I've glanced at "Lessons in Electric Circuits" (http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/) by Tony Kuphaldt, and it seems to cover all of the physics that you would need to get started with hardware hacking. Volume I appears to be the most relevant to you, covering the basics of voltage and currents. Once you understand that, you'll most likely be looking at specific parts that perform all of the complicated electronic functions (A/D Converters, H-Bridges, Omp Amps, etc), and don't need to fully understand the physics behind them, although it helps.
I'm currently going through "Making Things Talk" by Tom Igoe, whose audience appears to be non-technical, or at least non-hardware, people. It does not cover the physics and math behind the projects though.
One of the largest hurdles I see for this technology is raising enough investment capital to build a new fab, or recondition an old fab, for this custom integration of silicon and plastic. Currently Solar cell companies are able to leverage old processor fabs, but new technology such as this would need an entire new facility built, potentially at high initial investment and risk.
If you wanted to map asynchronous designs to an ordinary FPGA, I think there would be two major hurdles:
1) Choosing an asynchronous methodology (There are more then one), and mapping that to the LUT. This shouldn't be too difficult, but you are likely to have a high area overhead for this.
2) Getting the place and router to behave as you would expect it to. It depends if the router uses the clock to propagate it's information, although I expect it would NOT.
Getting the asynchronous IP core into a SoC system is not that difficult. You'll have to convert synchronous signals to asynchronous signals and vise versa, but once you figure that out (it's actually very simple) you can plug in the asynchronous core anywhere.
I used dual rail QDI in my circuit design, with a mix of four phase handshakes and two phase handshakes, depending on the application.
Fault-tolerant logic is definitely feasible - I worked on this for one project! The technique is patented by Achronix, but it definitely is almost bullet proof and only requires an area overhead similar to a voting schema.
There is definitely a very bound on the time that it could take, but one of the advantages of asynchronous is that you can design for the average case, not the worst case. Each circuit forms part of a data pipeline, and with enough data in this pipeline you can guarantee a maximum time limit.
Unfortunately, to match the minimum to the maximum, you would likely have to design your implementation to be very slow. In the constant time case you remove all the pipelining advantages, as you would be required to 'fill' the pipeline.
I worked at Achronix Semiconductor (San Jose startup) for over a year and a half designing Asynchronous Circuits. I can answer any questions about the specifics of designing these circuits.
Anyone interested in this topic should definitely look into the Cornell University research ( http://vlsi.cornell.edu/ ). Unlike most researchers in asynchronous research, they still tape out chips.
I had the great pleasure of visiting the Walker library last year. Not only is the library packed inch to inch with incredible artifacts as Wired describes, but it is truly his own as well, with items that have been great personal inspirations to him as well.
What surprised me the most, however, is how down to earth the entire family is. They are all energetic yet realistic, and some of the friendliest people I have ever met.
This is equivalent to hiring an outsourcing firm to teach you how to program.
Most of these trainers will not teach you the necessary fundamentals, provide a harmful crutch, and for all of this charge money for readily available, quality information from the internet.