Sounds like you have possibly found a viable candidate to remove the extra tethered wattage.
While reducing 'tethered wattage' is always desirable in a general sense, don't lose sight of the specific numbers; the cost of running 'inefficient' hosts may be less than you think. Take an example: an 800Mhps FPGA miner will generate $3/day. My i7 3770K full-size PC uses 90W at idle (I have measured it with a Kill-A-Watt meter). Of course I would not suggest using this as a host, but for illustrative purposes a 90W PC running 24 hours/day will cost about $0.25/day in electricity (2.2 kWh, $0.11/kWh). That's 8% of the mining income. If you happen to run multiple miners off that same PC, the cost of running it becomes an even smaller portion of the mining income. And if you are talking about running a bASIC, the cost of running a 90W PC becomes largely insignificant.
So if you were to use something like a Raspberry Pi, that uses only a few watts, to host your mining hardware, you'd be able to save at most $0.20/day or $0.25/day compared to a full-blown PC. Monthly, that's a savings of $6-$7. That may be significant to some people, and insignificant for others. I host my hardware using a small 25W Zotac Zbox, which I also use for my day-to-day computing tasks; this works well for me.
You should contact Inaba (BFL_Josh) and ask him to be nicer to Tom over the power issue. The power issue is really only relevant for a mining device when it nears its End Of Life cycle.
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