Hi Tim,
If I remember rightly, it was Intel, who had been testing this technology for the past few years to see if it had any impact on the hardware, and if it actually lowered costs due to better cooling. It is my understanding that this company has now moved to this method for a few of the data centers due to both of the above points proving to be positive.
If I remember rightly then the system removes all cooling fans from CPUs and GPUs etc, and let's the oil flowing do the heat transfer and cooling. I seem to remember them saying the only thing it did not work with was some moving parts such as HD's, however fans per se seem to work just fine and still spin in the oil, however obviously with no point due to the oil doing the cooling
3M sell this non-conductive, data-center immersive oil, so I think its now becoming quite widely used by the bigger companies due to it lowering cost, and because the heat gets put into a medium that makes it easier to reuse.
3M™ Novec™ 649 Engineered Fluid
"Heat Transfer, Immersion Cooling for Data Centers"
http://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/novec/produc ... 192&rt=rud
I think the future will be quite exciting for energy creation, distribution, and consumption. There are a lot of unique and clever ideas floating about and being researched. Many of which are connected with data centers due to the massive TDP and heat generation.
I do not really know much about AC/DC etc (apart from the obvious) but having a DC and/or AC plug on hardware surely would seem to make sense.