On a side note, I just watched Crockford on Javascript and he said lambda functions are the greatest innovation in computer science. Could you point me toward a resource that will explain why?
In more practical terms, you need lambdas to have closures, currying and higher-order functions in general. Without that you don't have Lisp, ML, Haskell, etc.
A lot of what that particular paper talks about is applicable to other languages that have lambda expressions in them.
Some of the examples in it does rely on lazy evaluation though. Laziness is usually encodable in most languages with lambdas. But most aren't lazy by default. Keep that in mind.