I couldn't stand the glow puck, but I did grow to like the robots.
I remember at FOX games that I attended, they would show the robots on the video board after a home team goal, and the crowd would just go nuts when the other robot would get turned into a puck and slapped away.
Good call earlier in the thread by comparing it to the Press Your Luck whammies...where you could create a game out of which one was popping up next.
FOX would also occasionally list the in-game speed of slap and snap shots, which I thought was pretty cool...considering the only time you'd see stuff like that was during skills competitions, where players didn't have to contend with defenders and all that, so it gave me a little extra appreciation of what goalies had to deal with under normal game conditions.