The most interesting thing is that most pattern matching algorithms up to then got slower with longer match strings, but Boyer-Moore actually got faster!
Another interesting bit of trivia: In the first chapter of my thesis I present a string matching algorithm with almost exactly the same asymptotic running time as BM -- but where BM performs exact matching using no precomputed index, my algorithm performs matching with mismatches using an index.
With an index, of course, exact matching is O(log N) time -- in a peculiar way, the "cost" of inexact matching is one index worth of efficiency.
[EDIT: On second thought, this last comment meaningful at all? I'm not sure, but it's almost 4AM so I'm not going to figure it out now.]