Useful approach. There's still a missing link for a perfect workflow: being able to export the CSS properties generated this way into a pre/postprocessor framework (bootstrap, zurb etc) instead of overriding the resulting CSS.
A note to the author, and a wish: please stop abusing the term unicorn just for the sake of having catchy trendy titles, unless there is a meaning in "the unicorn workflow" I'm not aware of.
Italian living in Finland here. I second the theories presented in this article.
I'm also recognising in my family the progressive mingling of Italian words with the totally unrelated structures of the weird ugro-finnish language.
For whatever reason, foods and curse words linger longer in a disrupted language.
My take on this is that very private situations (family dinners, arguments) create a humorous or angry context that stimulates and reinforces the use of this words.
Regarding mashups: I can mention the italian polpetta (meatball) becoming "polpettat" (singular) and "polpetteja" (plural)
I have both experience in wp multisite and in the wpmu commercial plugin.
Multisite adds >400ms latency to the whole system, which you can overcome only by adding some solid server-level caching system.
Wpmu doesn't slow down as much, and it can give you some nice added features like translation management. You can "translate" pretty much everything, including images and css. The url structure you need is available out of the box. I never tested alternative plugins.