I always thought the ice was a brilliant idea. The math is easy to calculate (assuming you know your boil volume well enough) and you can't beat how fast it gets you to pitching temperatures. If I wasn't now doing full wort boils, I would do it that way by freezing bottled water the night before.
Brown took his lumps from some uptight homebrewers on what he did in the show, such as keeping the steeping grains in the brew pot, and he did later apologize and made process changes and posted them to his blog, but I still think that was an excellent show on homebrewing. Like all his Good Eats shows, he explained the how and the why and showed you how easy it is.