It looks like Intel mainly had cooling on the brain when designing BTX. The ducts and fans are huge.
I am assuming that the riser card is part of the spec for micro-BTX but not for reg. BTX. I am suprised that intel overlooked hdd cooling issues, apparently. Although most people won't be running 15K drives in a micro-anything case and hard drive cooling kits are available, the extra heat can effect MTBF hours.
Personally I think all the ducts are ugly and the micro-BTX PCIe riser card brings back horrid memories of proprietary OEM form factors I have worked on before. Intel needed to think more about designing cooler processors than getting everybody to a new pc form factor, IMO.

personally i think that for a long time btx will still not be in the consumer level market and only companies like Intel's cousin (dell) will use it...

Cooling a 120 watt processor then using that heated air to cool almost everything else in the case? whats so intelligent about that? No thanks!

Agreed its damn ugly too

I think its a bad attempt at thermal management, i like how we got Cpu fans which are designed to let air flow out of the case and vga coolers that vent hot air directly out and PSUs that vent hot air directly out....makes more sense doesnt it? low heat low teperature gets cooled by the ambient airflow first, otherwise youll only heat them up....i think whoever designed this was not a thermal physicist and was only part of the cpu design tech team trying to get as much cooling to his overheating netburst processor...