Treemaps are fantastic for showing hierarchical + quantitative information in a single view (with at least another axis thrown in if you add coloring the boxes in).
This view, however, is about as useful as using a pie chart--perhaps the intent was to correlate the points with share of total attention?
On the other hand, I subscribe to the "piecharts are almost always evil and useless" school, and should in almost all cases be replaced with stacked bar charts (sideways preferably)--which the strip view is rather similar to.
Well, percentages aren't even "correct" unless you're saying "percent of total number of points on the front page". Since that total is non-constant, the percentages are almost meaningless. If suddenly someone posts a PG essay, which gets like 800 pts, everything's percentage would drop.
You could, however, just have a list of pts and the titles... but then you get the front page of HN :)
On a side note, the animations between views are nice.