If I were a VC, I'd crap myself with the risks and the potentially Stellar opportunity if it worked.
We all talk about BTC as an alternative to FIAT and the banking system, but what if you could go out and buy a device (printer, USB hub, router or whatever), and rather than paying all cash for it, your electricity bill became your payment channel like a Hire Purchase agreement (that the provider can locate should they repo)? You could buy a $100 device for $50 down, and pay the remainder via BTC over a year or so (even if the price didn't go anywhere), and once paid you start collecting small amounts of BTC and maybe swap it for a device upgrade at a future date, or save the BTC (even a couple of dollars a month), to use as a convenient way to pay for microtransactions.
The incentive would be low up front costs for hardware with a 'buy now pay later' system (all too popular these days), and the latent benefit would be plugging into the BTC world. By paying through your electricity bill you simplify a lot of things, and get FIAT into BTC (imagine the price change when hundreds of millions of people have this by default rather than having to go out and learn and be convinced of BTC).
I don't think they would need to be powerful miners/transaction processors, and don't think they should be either, since distribution is more important for the blockchain than total hash power.
The 25%/75% split is a bit of an insult (especially if you think of that as an interest rate on the loan they're providing on a low up front purchase), but if it were scaled so that they get all of it initially, and it moves in your favour over time for being an honest player to the point where you can start accumulating a bit of BTC, this could really be a game changer in proportions that even the most optimistic dare not dream. It could replace a huge chunk of the banking system and make a whole new paradigm that is different than most of us were envisioning in how this thing might evolve, so it's not a "this way or that", but "none of the above, it went somewhere completely different".
With all that, even if optimistic, it looks like it will take several years to develop and deploy the technology and get the social adoption. To me that means at least 5 years more, but the result could be those crazy prices we see from time to time for the price of BTC.
I'm looking forward to buying a $100 printer for $50 down from whichever manufacturer incorporates this technology first, then seeing BTC climb so ridiculously that it's paid off after a month or so even though I was planning for it to take a year...
cool thinking bro