I'm not quite sure why they went with the borked "half the screen is empty" look. Ok, it's easier to read, but that negative space is bad design, regardless.
I found the design to be very intuitive even though I'd never encountered that type of information flow before. The curly braces didn't seem to serve any purpose as far as I could tell, but the negative space was great. I knew exactly where the content was going to pop up before I clicked the "link". No jarring resize, just plain ole empty space not taking your attention away from the main content until you want see content in there.
