Similarly... I've fielded questions regarding using the public Tor for bulk data transfer, backups, distributed file stores and the like. But it always proves hard for me to resolve the impact in order to say go one way or the other. If they make a private Tor network, growth will be very slow because there are not enough nodes to ensure anonymity. If they use public Tor, it might get hammered. And it seems the long term survival of using either pub/priv for this depend on whether users both felt anon enough to give bandwidth and have enough bandwidth and the ethic to give it. If they do, the math works out ok. If not, the net tanks.
And then there is the problem of authority servers. It would be nice if Tor had an automated election system where that function would roam about inside the Tor network itself as a self sustaining agent. Because right now, I think one could cut them off the net and take Tor with it.