I realize I am a very old fuddy duddy but this means the email needs to be html embedded for it to work correctly? As such it seems less of a OpenMail and more of a MIME-Type/HTML-Email format.

Smells like embedded experiences (http://bit.ly/i2f8J5) or Web Intents (http://bit.ly/kj0fHE)?

Agree with Jonathan, it does sound alot like embedded experiences. However with the Open Mail format you can only provide links, not active content as you can with embedded experiences. They may actually work nice together. You can take quick action on something with the action links but if you open the email you may get a richer experience and allow you to do a lot more, like reply to a comment.