For those who are wondering, the "April Fools" of this is that there is in fact no hardware dedicated ethernet controller, instead it is a software-assisted 10BASE-T Ethernet controller. It is surprisingly high performance. <1ms ping times, able to transfer ~3MBits/s without a hitch. This could easily replace the use of an ENC28J60 and other controllers for getting wired Ethernet hooked up to the ESP.
The HackADay article has a good bit of detail of how the project works: http://hackaday.com/2016/04/01/ethernet ... e-esp8266/ the Github link has the code: http://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet and the youtube video shows it in action.
There's a lot of directions this project would go and I'm hoping to raise some interest to see if I can get some help with it! I'll be updating this main thread with more information as it goes.