[BoostedOne]

Well, reason why I wont mess with a side mount is because I personally do not like them.
The reason I do not like them is I dont care how beefy they are, they are being fed with a hole thats the size of your shoe.
There are many factors affecting intercooler performance. With an upgraded side mount, you do get better efficiency than you get from a stocker. But, you are not feeding it with much cooling air. The only air going to the intercooler is between the passenger side foglight and the end of the grill. Thats about 11 sqaure inches of frontal area. A 20" long core in a front mount will be feeding from about 60 sqaure inches, and thats if you leave the divider strip in. So for a given speed, a 20" wide front mount will be getting 6 times the ambient air that the side mount will get. So even if in a lab environment the side mount upgrade is just as efficient as this hypothetical front mount, the front mount will still be MORE efficient in the real world because it has more air to work with.

As for the additional piping and its effect on performance, one word... MYTH. I proved that to myself almost 10 years ago. I had a turbo car which came stock non intercooled. The engine was mounted longitudinally(like the new Passats), the turbo was on the passenger side which meant the throttle body pointed at the passenger shock tower. When I first did my front mount intercooler, I had a 90 degree bend immediately after the turbo in 2", then it stepped up to 2.25" and was about a 20" run straight into the intercooler...That side was good.. Problem was the passenger side. There outlet of the intercooler was behind the headlight, and pointed mostly back but a little towards the driver side. I had to get to the passenger side. I ended up running about a 120 degree bend to get the piping pointed to the passenger side, then after about 24" it cleared the engine ran a 90 back for about 24", then the was another 90 to make it point at the drivers side again.
In total from the intercooler to the throttle body was 300 degrees in bends, and atleast 5 feet of piping in that branch alone! . I ended up modifying my intake manifold. There is a way you can cut and weld them on that type of car where the throttle body points straight forward instead of towards the passenger side. This allowed me to run a 90 and a 45 degree bend or something, and about 18" of pipe. So I cut down the bend amount by 1/2(300 to 135), and the length of that section by like 70%.... And you know what the effect was? It made the car easier to work on, thats all. It did not affect performance one bit. And I used to race the car at the track twice a week back then.
Also, consider the fact that just because you cannot SEE the intercooler piping on the factory setup, it does not mean it isnt there. The pipe from the turbo to the intercooler from the factory is VERY long. It goes from the brake booster across the back of the engine, then down the back of the engine, up under the frame rail, then down into the fender well.

On edit, I looked at Tyrolsports page, and saw their tests... Considering they gave no useful information on the FMIC they used, or how they piped it, I would hardly consider there to be a myth busted. There are TONS of FMIC's on the market I could put in a test to prove how my SMIC worked better if I had one and wanted to. As a hint, those ICs that are like 5" tall, 20" long, and 2.5" thick with the inlet and outlets on the end just plain suck. They have lots of volume, decent frontal area, but no flow area for the engine air.
And looking at their lag claims, comparing their second run with the FMIC there is maybe a 200-300RPM difference between equivalent boost pressures... Think to yourself..When you go WOT from a redlight(or you downshift at higher speeds), how long does it take to accelerate 300rpm? And thats really only for one or two gears anyway unless you are a really slow shifter.
It would be more worthwhile to show boost response in a graph of boost pressure vs time for things like acceleration from a dead stop and a 60-100mph run from 3rd to 4th.