I would get soooo frustrated with this process. I would just play the chords.

Clapton did this on the 5/4 intro to Creams "White Room".
 
If you play the notes of the triad inversions separately you get a very different sound than strumming them together.
 
The overdrive/distortion sounds very different when you play the notes separately.  It's a fun thing to play around with.
 
When demonstrating dual lead guitar part to students I've often played both simultaneously to demonstrate the effect. It's fun to work out a way to do it, but sounds completely different to double tracking the parts.  Imagine the possibilities if you track the three parts (triads or partial chord) on different guitars/pickups?

Brian May regularly did this with Queen. Though, in his case he was really doing it for orchestration purposes from the start. He would play them often with his finger up on the kneck to create a very rounded, fairly pure tone.

One difference of course is that you don't get that intermodulation effects when you do it this way, something that is a big part of distorted guitar sound, sometimes a good thing but sometimes not. You can do things like major sevenths or 6ths and whatnot and not get a lot of wierd intermodulation nastiness.

Joe Pass used to do it too, but he was so fast at it that most people thought he was playing guitar.





Chord Inversions have been around a while.




Here's a video explanation featuring Tommy Emanuel speaking about the book:

http://youtu.be/vO2Pu3Dadkw



best regards,
mike

Great book Mike. Was my bible for quite a while.