I wonder how Illodin feels about that since from the quotes it appears that he was one of the people trying to get this mining up and running trying to be one of the first to insta-mine it.
I would not be happy if i was mislead like that. It seems that in this case Evan certainly did not keep his word at least not as it could have been reasonably understood from his posts.
I managed to mine just fine on my Windows desktop using VirtualBox + Ubuntu. I also bought more coins at the rate of 10k @ 0.25 BTC. I would say I'm pretty happy how things turned out. I hope my answer didn't disappoint you too much.