It's very much in the beginning step. He's at layer 2 of the network stack - ethernet data-link-layer - so has a long, long ways to go before being a web serve

It's very much in the beginning step. He's at layer 2 of the network stack - ethernet data-link-layer - so has a long, long ways to go before being a web server. Making a hardware-only web server is definitely something doable, you'd just need massive numbers of users hitting one server to make it worthwhile. What would have been more interesting would be serving applications, instead of static web files, since serving static files is a solved problem that doesn't need speedup. Otherwise it would be a great teaching/learning tool for VHDL hardware.