Mike,
It's a little long, but here's the whole disussion.
From Ron Whitten’s review of Chambers Bay explains the thought behind them:
“There is hardly a flat spot on the premises, and that includes the tee boxes. In what may be the first truly original design idea of the 21st century, Charlton convinced his colleagues to abandon traditional tee pads in favor of long, skinny, free-flowing ribbons of teeing space. Many are not much wider than walking paths; many are recessed rather than elevated; most are gently contoured with a variety of flats spots just the size of throw rugs. The idea is to pick the lie that might best help shape a shot off the tee: sidehill lies if you wish to fade or draw the ball, a slightly uphill lie if you need help getting airborne, a downhill lie if you want to keep it under the wind, or a flat lie. It's too early to know whether USGA officials will accept those unorthodox teeing areas for the U.S. Open. Jones hopes they will.”
"We'll probably address that after the [2010] U.S. Amateur," he says. "But it's not like there are no flat spots out there. We have dozens of 'batter's boxes' within the undulations. I would hope they'd position the markers far apart and let golfers chose their particular lies. Our goal was to get into the players' minds, even on the tee, and to put some integrity back into tee shots. Don't let them just stick a peg in the ground and bomb it."
Why I think it’s a bad idea:
99% of people will choose a flat lie on all occasions. The 1% that will make use of the slopes on tees are the very elite that should never have anything done to make the game easier for them.
Ignoring that idea, let’s say that 50% of the tees are flat and 50% has undulation. Given the choice, as I said before, 99% of players will choose a flat lie. What we end up with is all the wear on the flat sections. If you think putting the tees only on the roll will solve this then go play a public course and watch what happens to any tee marker on an undulating section of tee. It gets moved!
So if we cut undulate our tees we will inevitable cut the useable area by half. So golfers will choose to go to 50% of the available tee every time and we will get massive wear in the flat areas. So what we have is a poorly conceived idea that will lead to concentrated wear. I ask you to ask all your friends to see if anyone of them in competition would intentionally tee the ball up on an uneven section of a tee.
I found only one, Dick Zokol, and he was good enough to win on the PGA Tour tour and liked to work the ball.