i don't think the goal was to revolutionalize the design of vB, but simply have a different spice for this site... the clean clear and crisp design of the header is good... very professional, easy to read, and easy to locate any button...

for the width etc, it sure is a question of monitors, as designers are supposed to deal with all the users, not the monitor of the designer... 80% of the people on the internet are at a 800x600 of resolution, not 1024+ ... most users with higher resolutions are gamers, designers, graphists... and that's logical... internet is more a place of documentation, and if you read a load of text in 1024, you have to make the text bigger to read it...

the count of about 680 millions of surfers using 800x600 is based on the last "i2" statistic about all the european/american users of internet... it is not counting the asians, so imagine...

even your browsers open their default window at 800x600... mozilla, IE, Safari... with you have no prefs, first window to open is at 760pixels wide...