Sure, I'm sure that most of us in the field have had some experience with such cabinets.
I don't suspect that heat would generally be an issue, since in most cases the back of such cabinets are either wire mesh, or wide open and the fronts can be left open or temporarily removed and most have fans to facilitate air flow, but you can always augment them with a couple floor fans if needed.
I would think that perhaps cabling might be a nightmare, since before as I understood it you had more or less a linear bus type setup where you cascaded one switch to the next to the next located on each table terminating with the primary switch now, at least in my imagination, you would have home runs from each client machine to a central cabinet...