Anyone ever thought of using something like that or maybe an ipod touch for a similar setup? I was on a plane last night talking about stuff like that with a guy who happened to be a gamer as well and he was letting me use this Archos thing for a bit. It is basically a 250GB hard drive with a touch screen attached in the casing.

Just curious if anyone ever thought of that for a real functioning video capable MFD.

Depending on the device it is quite possible, but also quite a bit of work to implement. You may want to take a look at touch buddy:
http://www.touch-buddy.com/forums/faq/18-master-faq.html
and x-plane has something for the iPhone already:
X-Plane Remote: http://www.x-plane.com/pg_X-Plane_Remote.html

I had forgotten about touchbuddy. I might have an Archos coming to me CHEAP...FREE and I was wanting to know if it might be possible or had been done yet.

It doesn't like they are very programmable or customizable. One of their models runs linux but it seems they managed to lock it down despite that.

Yep it looks bad for me to use this for anything other than its intended use. However I can let one of my buddies who likes to tinker with Linux see what he can find out and if it will work for my intentions. It just might take him a long time to get to that point. As such I just may get the Samsung USB video screens.