http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1246990
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2645170
This story won't see much traction on HN. The cult of Mac is too strong, and HN users generally aren't interested in secure operating systems.
Now you can read up on Mark Miller's published papers [2] on Joule (actually pretty secure) and some of the issues associated with making things secure and get a much better feeling of solidity (for example).
So when the press release comes out that its passed the Defense department's B1/B2 review, then I suspect it will get a lot of interest here and else where.
[1] http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=10279027 LinkedIn profile, one job CEO of this thing? A blog full of black hat sort of exploits but I didn't see any peer reviewed work.
[2] http://research.google.com/pubs/author35958.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluat...
The "black hat sorts of exploits" attributed to her tend to be things like, "abusing odd, barely-documented corners of x86 chipsets to bypass hardware-encrypted trusted boot roots". Thinking less of a professional in my field for having exploits attributed to them tends to be a bad idea, but it's a uniquely bad idea in Rutkowska's case.
Outside of conference presentations, Rutkowska doesn't have much peer-reviewed work in the literature. That's because Rutkowska is originally from the malware/rootkit/virus part of the industry. For obvious reasons, antivirus doesn't generate a lot of peer-reviewed academic research. One of those obvious reasons is that they're too busy printing money hats to bother. (This to my chagrin; I am very much not from the AV/malware part of the field).
I'm not vouching for Qubes or even saying that I think the approach (of semi-transparently allocating secure VMs for each application or trust domain on the system) is viable. But Rutkowska is worth taking seriously.