Would it be possible to use the new 1.1 linked chest for the transfer of items between surfaces? Would it be more UPS-friendly?

It would in theory be possible, but chest connections are already super UPS friendly so you'd see only very very slight UPS improvements compared to the existing chest connections. Also it would have major drawbacks (there would be no logistics chest connections) and it would be absolutely awful to implement all the various necessary edge cases of ID assignment for the placement/deconstruction logic. For this reason I won't be changing the mechanics of existing chest connections.

I will add linked chest connections as a separate connection type as soon as anyone shows me a working Factorissimo megabase that uses chest connections properly and responsibly, but where chest connections still consume more than 2% of the total processing time. I don't think this will ever happen, but feel free to prove me wrong.

There is one potentially large non-UPS related benefit to linked chests: buffer size. A regular chest connection with loaders requires a buffer of belt_speed * update_delay items to work continously. Ignoring super-speed modded belts, even a vanilla blue belt with an update delay of 600 ticks requires a buffer of 450 items. Depending on the price of items (i.e. nuclear fuel, processing units) this can be quite expensive. Linked chests on the other hand "update" instantly and thus only require a belt_speed sized buffer, which for most items would be a single stack.

Allow me to provide a different perspective:

No matter how large the chest buffer is or how expensive the items that are going through it, if the output is not blocked then the buffer will never contain more than 10 seconds worth of what you produce!

If the output is blocked, and the chest buffer is filling up with very expensive items, you can just prevent that by limiting the chest slots on both sides. Even for particularly expensive items that are only needed in very small quantities but still have unreasonably large stack sizes (such that even a single stack is way too much buffer for you), you have the ability to set the chest connection to balance mode and insert items using a circuited inserter or a small logistics request. In any case, this is not an issue which is made any more solvable by linked chests and it's certainly not the issue you described.

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