And it is easier to learn - you don't need to know what the bar is and why moving it upwards moves the list downwards.

the distortion requires fitting all the items in the viewable region. the only reasonable initial state other than the one shown is auto-selecting the first item in the list (which has it's own issues when you require explicit selection). doing this obscures the fact that it's a list, it just looks like a weird graphic... maybe centering the distorted items would make it clearer? it also doesn't scale very well. everything is pretty much illegible to me at 1600x1200, and that's only with 40 items in the list.

as for the easier to learn part - come on, you really can't be serious. in an ideal world, where the user is a complete blank slate who has no previous exposure to any form of computer system, perhaps. i still wouldn't bet on it, but perhaps. but in the real world, where any user is constantly presented with scrollbars which behave consistently across a variety of operating systems, there is no way that the fisheye box is more intuitive. convergent affordances will always be more intuitive - for example, the scrollbar affordance can be used in various contexts, where the behavior is the same. it can be used to scroll through a list of items, or to scroll down a web page, for example. the fisheye list box is useful in the context of the list, but would be far less useful, and i'd personally find it annoying, in the context of scrolling down a webpage.

an alternative idea would be to activate hot spots in the traditional list box at the top and bottom regions of the box, which begin scrolling as the user enters them. kind of the best of both worlds, in theory at least. in practice, i've seen this done on a number of flash sites and the unexpected movement of the box is disconcerting. still, that's probably because it's unexpected - if it became more of a convention, it might be a good solution.

That is all valid, but for me is not enough to simply dismiss it as 'nothing to see'. It is an intriguing technique that can lead someone to some gui designer to new thinking tracks.