There is, likely value in long reads, but what non-niche research applications are there for highly error’d reads that justify a valuation of several billion dollars?
The area where DNA sequencing will first be revolutionizing clinical practice is in sequencing pathogens for sake of identification. In these instances nanopore sequencing rules, because it can give answers in minutes.
The most compelling near term applications (NITP etc) use fragmented DNA, and long reads will have no benefit here.
So, yes. Long reads are useful, but you need to have at least reasonable performance in other respects. The same thing has been seen with PacBio, who have not played well in the market, despite having a read length advantage.
With sepsis, every hour counts.
For things approaching a read length the per-base error rate of a single read is simply irrelevant. In practice, with sufficient coverage (e.g. 20x) you simply don't care about the per base error rate of the reads.