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I couldn't help but think "Bitcoin mining!" Back in 2011 I remember discussions on bitcointalk.org about giving away Bitcoin miners disguised as "heaters" which would, of course, mine for the manufacturer. So the manufacturer gets all the bitcoins without paying for electricity.

Unfortunately this will never work. Space heaters are cheap enough that their price is a non-issue. Plus they are smaller and hotter. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004AQLUHC is $15, the size of a bread toaster, and 1500W. You can't have this thermal density from a computing device.

This only seems practical in a handful of climates that stay cold throughout the entire year.

Many places that have very cold winters often also have very warm summers. In which case, do you turn the servers off in the summer?

That was my first thought, as well: Ottawa was wicked cold this past February ("extreme cold and wind chill warning again? fml..."), so it would have required a basement full of servers to have meaningful impact...

...and we can expect our usual stupid hot, "be nice to be in Houston right about now" peak couple of weeks, when the basement is nicest part of the house and the AC runs pretty much non stop.

Windsor here. Our winter wasn't as bad as yours, but it was one of the worst we've ever gotten. My machines and monitors in my room keep the place nice and toasty, but in the summer, this place is unbearable. Just sitting causes you to break into a sweat.
So.....what happens if you don't need heat anymore(in the summer and such)? I always imagined solutions like this as installing a server in a basement and only using the hot air to heat up the house through air ducts - and if not needed just venting the air outside. In the pictures the server looks like a wall-hanging radiator - surely you can't just switch it off if you don't need it?
I don't know much about Finnish summers, but I don't imagine they get too warm
The Internet Archive already does this; their headquarters on Funston Street in San Francisco is heated by the server banks that run archive.org. (This occasionally makes the building a little too hot, but luckily the Richmond District in SF is usually a fairly cool climate.)
I've been wondering when such a thing would take hold. If we end up with applications amenable to homomorphic encryption, this could be more viable. It could also lead to further changes in the relative economic power of cold regions where electricity is cheap.
The folks at https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html are doing this in Germany.