There is far too many hackathons for non-students, such as AngelHack, BattleHack, Startup Weekend (arguable to whether an hackathon) amongst many more.
A lot of student hackathons accept dropouts too on a case-by-case basis. But there's hackathons for all :)
This was partly an instinctive decision, but I think it's too easy to go mobile. Part of the reasoning for having a tangible card is the novelty and the failproof factor behind it.
cjc1083's proposed attack vector is an interstitial page which drops a Java/Flash 0-day on you and forwards you to your original target site, leaving you compromised and none the wiser. My point is that if you can even do the redirect in the first place, it's much simpler to just iframe in the attack page and do the drop directly rather than waiting on user input to do it in a manner that they might notice.
A lot of student hackathons accept dropouts too on a case-by-case basis. But there's hackathons for all :)