It was definitely interesting, but it wasn't the breakthrough it was hyped-up to be. Seeing it as a 'hello world' is a cool idea, though. The hardware of the cell was ready and waiting. So Venter and his team rewrote an old program and gave it a spin. Nice.

This is more likely a lack of understanding on my part, but I'm not sure where epigenetics comes into it? The majority of the cell components - i.e. all the organelles, chemicals, etc - were already present and arranged in the 'surrogate' cell. So all the 'epigenetic' stuff was already in place. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

Not so sure about the random splicing part, either. Food manufacturers have been inserting genes into specific places on bacterial plasmids for a long a time, using directors like codon relationships and ionic interactions. Again - if I'm outta line... :)