Nice. Still VM only though it seems, but that's really good for its development if devs can get a reference version running.
If it's ever stable enough to run as a main system I'll definitely be installing it.

Also how the hell is the tty showing an image? Is that unique to hurd?

That's not a real tty, but a monitor emulated by QEMU, it can display whatever the operating system tells it to display. It wouldn't work through telnet or serial. The Linux kernel displays one Tux per core during boot, unless configured otherwise. I also remember w3m being able to display images.