It sounds to me like it's an incremental improvement on existing technique, which the researchers are justifiably excited about, and through the Mighty Power of Mass-Market Science Journalism (TM) it becomes something that has never been done before, instead of it "merely" being done better than ever before. Photons have definitely been "teleported" before, as have individual atoms [1]. Though I scare-quote the word because it doesn't really precisely correspond to what people think of when they hear the term.

It's interesting, but it's not a breakthrough, nor does it herald any sort of advance in anything resembling Star Trek transporters, though to its credit I think this is the first Mass Market Science Journalism (TM) article on quantum teleportation I've seen that managed to avoid that faulty comparison, so points for that I guess.

[1]: http://www.livescience.com/7647-teleportation-milestone-achi... (which I would note fails the Star Trek test)

Quantum optics is outside my realm of expertise; to be honest my eyes kind of glaze over whenever these guys give a talk. The real life applications of this are not really teleportation in the "beam me up sense" but more along the lines of encryption.

If your transmission is based on quantum entangled photon states, it is physically impossible to eavesdrop without giving yourself away, since the act of eavesdropping 'collapses the quantum superposition' (like when you open the box with Schrodingers cat). They've actually already rolled out systems based on this technology in various places in the world, but there is a lot of work to improve bandwidth and so forth.

I won't say too much more as I'm well outside the field and will probably garble it.

Minimum round trip time between San Francisco and Tokyo is about 60ms due to the speed of light, which means in practice FPS games are unplayable across the ocean.

If they manage to implement this shit, we'll be able to have FPS games hosted anywhere in the world!