MacHeist is a great idea. Those guys are really tapping into the Mac community spirit. It's interesting how these same initiatives do not tend to pop up in the Windows community. ]
Not sure if anyone else was following the story after mydreamapp.com finished (mydreamapp from the same people behind MacHeist). Soon after it was over a copycat site "mydreamwindowsapp.com" opened up. It was a horrible flop and never took off at all.
I"m sure this is partly due to the founder being a less-than-nice-person, but even beyond that it seemed to me the windows people just didn't seem to care anyway. I don't want to generalise, and I'm certainly not saying Windows people have no imagination or spirit, I just find it interesting how Windows users tend not to get behind these projects like Mac users do.