I guess if you're in the SEO, Marketing business and having your clients sign up through the AdSense referral button, it might work out good.
But for the rest of us, nope.

I can't see any AdSense newbie signing up through my site and earning enough for the bonus within the given time.

I think there was another thread on this - and if I recall, the general concensus was that we didn't get much, if anything from it. There were a couple of exceptions, but generally it didn't perform too well.

When you read through here - it seems to take most people quite a while to break the $100 mark. So from inauguration with adsense, I guess most people don't reach the target threshold to get any revenue from it.

I see it as another means of lining Googles already deep pockets - a cpc would be much fairer way of doing it.

nope.
I think the only sites that can benefit adsense or adwords referal is those deals with SEO, webmasters and Marketing. so Knowing that I don't have adsense and adwords referal in my pages, but I do have picasa and firefox and I got one or two conversion by day.

I have got only one Adsense referral conversion so far, but many referral conversions for other Google products. It seems reaching US$100 is difficult for many starting with Adsense