Mass-market is already happening
What about the new Apple G5 computers? Apple I'm sure plans to sell at least tens of thousands of them; not a number to brush off. And they have water-cooled components out of the box. The Apple propellerheads must've done some very thorough testing on those things before taking that much of a financial risk.
I'm sure it works, and must have some benefit compared to air-cooling or they wouldn't have done it. Also, the notion that typical users really have no idea whats in their computers applies to Macintosh users more than anybody. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If computers are going to keep getting faster than new cooling solutions will have to be introduced into the mainstream. The physics of shrinking chips just demands that...no way around it. So mass-market is going to happen with watercooling I think, probably after heatpipe HSF's are mainstream to the point of commoditization, which is happening now.
As far as enthusiasts go, I'll return to the car analogy, there are drivers and there are hot-rodders. You see a lot of little Honda Civics out there, a "mainstream" user, but every now and then you see one painted lizard green, running NOX with a six-inch exhaust tip and a airplane wing glued to the trunk...thats a "enthusiast!" Take whats stock and make it go faster...thats what overclocking your computer is basically.
Its already happened with air-coolers. Time was in 'puter world that using copper in your heatsink, or a 80mm fan, was extreme bleeding edge geekery. These days thats the stock Intel reference cooler. Crack open a Dell XPS and you will find a nicer HSF than anything that existed, even for the enthusiast, four years ago. The same thing will happen with water-cooling.
This all assumes Moore's law holds true for a while on the process side, and it looks like there are snags cropping up for everybody in the business at 90 nanometers. So if Moore's law stops, I have no idea of the future regarding coolers. All bets are off!
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