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Don't have any first hand experience, but it shouldn't make any real difference concerning performance or redundancy.
(NB: The method can also can be used with longer cables when "stacking" TOR across multiple cabinets.)
To your last question, perhaps. What's being done, for a stack of 4, is to insure if a stack member with one of the (two) uplinks fails, the remaining stack member, with uplink, is physically the center switch. This avoids the need for traffic to transit from one end of the stack to another to get to/from the uplink.
If there are more that 4 switches, it probably makes sense to keep members with two uplinks as far apart as possible, again to avoid needless transit to the remaining uplink switch.
Personally, though, when you consider normal traffic flow, I wonder if it really makes enough of a difference to concern ourselves.
