Agile comes a full circle?

Was watching a rather interesting talk by the Wikispeed CEO  in the SDEC 12: Keynote.

So, we might have gotten to being agile, decades after, having taken a page from manufacturing. But surely, the software practices thereafter evolved much faster than its manufacturing counterparts. Now, however, it seems like the manufacturing world  should catch up soon . The presentation above talks about a whole lot things. Their process already seems to have embraced a lot of stuff we do, some adapted -

1. They call it eXtreme Manufacturing (XM)
2. Scrum - 7 day
3. Cross-functional teams
4. Swarming
5. Feedback - Showcasing often
6. Evolutionary design - starting with ugly&working&frugal products
7. Inter-changeable/modularized parts
8. TDD! and regression suites
9. Promiscuous pairing, even!! 

Wonder if it would be an interesting intro to the many non-IT clients we might encounter in the consulting world, I suppose - especially making the non-IT stakeholders see value in some of the practices we espouse? Not sure if these attempts are unique, but the extent to which these guys have adopted seems quite impressive - and then make it work? 100 mpg? 3-hour swarmed assembly? Awesome!

Seems like they also presented in Agile 2012 in Dallas - wonder what your takeaways were, if you were there.

Here is another, shorter, talk o TED by Joe Justice.