I was just talking to Boris and he did a little more digging on Dell's IdeaStorm site. As it turns out, the application is provided by Salesforce.com and produced by CrispyIdeas.
Check it out, this is the same type of site, but designed for Salesforce.com.
Dell's Ideastorm is a branded version of 3rd party software, which means that we're likely to see a lot more organizations take notice. According to the feature comparison chart at CrispyIdeas, the enterprise version of their software goes for $495 a month. That seems quite reasonable to me.
What may be even more interesting is how these sites are put into practice. Like I said before, discovering popular customer ideas is the easy part - but finding the balance between customer voice and business objectives can get messy quickly.
Either way, I think this is an innovation in the customer community world.