I am a huge fan of novelty runs. HappyLee's SMB walkathon made me _so_ happy when it came out. Contrary to what Omega said, I think such runs will actually *broaden* the appeal of TASes - while plenty of normal runs are pretty amazing to the average viewer, there are many that pretty much just look like a guy running forward for a while unless you are a hardcore TASer and know how to spot all the optimizations, or read the submission text.
With runs that have to do obviously amazing/clever/silly things to accomplish some goal, everyone can understand the work that went into it and appreciate the new perspective on the game, or humor value of the situations the runner gets into.
It also leads to more "Wow, you can _do_ that!?!?" moments - it's obvious that every game has some optimal time to completion, but it's not obvious that every game can be beaten without one if it's primary controls, or with the most useless item equipped the whole time, or without collecting any powerups, or whatever.
In fact, my very first attempt at a tool-assisted run was of this type - I just posted a run in the
relevant thread of the first level of SMB3 in which I minimized the number of frames spent touching the ground or a normal platform. It's pretty sloppy, since I'm a n00b at this, but being able to do new things to the big famous games is a big incentive for me to learn at all.