From a user perspective, it looks like this will work great and will simplify a lot of node setups.
This is one important piece of procedural texturing that the old Blender Internal engine was able to do but was lost in the Cycles era. The initial idea was that people who needed more complete functionality would just use the OSL kernel (as the first generation of CUDA compilers had issues with larger kernels), but it did not exactly pan out as planned.