I was reading it on a Surface tablet using Metro-IE10 and thought the design and navigation were very slick. It works very well on it, every page starts with a fullscreen image, scrolling down the text appears while the image fades, at the bottom of the page the pagination links appear.
I looked at the NY Times project article and that did not work as well on Surface. They were undoubtedly inspired by it, maybe they optimized the design of this article as a showcase for their own tablet.
