I do not think it is the future. Maybe a few will dabble with it, but the lowest gears would be really close to each other, the higher gears would have bigger jumps between the gears. That is not an ideal scenario.
I think roadies can get by with a smaller range, my road bike 328 percent, my Rohloff 526%, my two derailleur touring bikes (one of which is the Sherpa) is 558 percent.
I could see it working for a road bike, but suspect that the range of gearing will be too tight for touring. Might work for rando or audax riding.
For touring, I like to have a lot of gears in the range of about 50 to 90 gear inches, that is the range that I am using the vast majority of time so I like quite a few well spaced gears. But I am not on the steep uphills that much, so I do not mind having a small number of really lower gears as long as I have at least one that is always low enough.
But that gearing system I think will have lots of low gears but not many up in the range where I am spending most of my time.
If they reversed the system so that the gearing was on the crank instead of on the wheel, then I think you would have a small number of the really low gears but more of the higher gears, which I think would make more sense. But to do that I could see rapid wear of the cog on the rear wheel.
