I was scribbling out the 16 Bundesländer on scratch paper after I read your post, and realized how great an idea this is for Germany!
Germany has 3 city states (Hansestadt Bremen, Hansestadt Hamburg, Berlin), plus teeny Saarland that really get underrepresented by area (in Germlisch:
underrepresentedbyareacitystates), even though
Germany's map is fairly simple.
Since the USA has 50 "pixels", it is more interesting to look at, though. Germany becomes a fairly formless block with only 16 bits, but the concept would still be really useful for presenting heat-mapped data.