Your more quailified than I am. I have never handled a waterblock as yet which puts me at a major disadvantage and frankly everytime I go into my PC I break something! If my day job of crazy engineering to do big changes in performance has shown me anything some practical experience is all you need (although too much makes you think nothing is possible). Someone laughing at power not being an issue in CPU design clearly knew nothing about what they were talking about.
Im rather enjoying long posting and will poster a longer reply on where I think water cooling is going. Saw this just now on realworldtech (a nice very geek forum) on a thread on if smartphones are more than enough.
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/...93355&roomid=2
I agree that there is a huge market for Atom style processors which are good enough processing wise but the type of people who would and have watercooled are not that market and the overclockers article is a little simplistic. The future is multi core chips which are completely power limited. In such a case it is my believe that more cooling is better and hence there is a market for water cooling.