Ok, I'm interested in seeing something like that. If you have a link, I'll take a look--thanks. (If you're thinking of 't Hooft's, then I know about it, but its predictions are in serious conflict with mainstream physics, from what I understand).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine
And yes, this is a cheap trick. That's the point. "Porting" our current theories to some new, whacky substrate, peeking at the textbooks all the while, is Not Interesting and will not lead to new results.
They are more powerful in the sense that P-time for quantum computers (aka BQP) is hypothesized to be larger than P-time for Turing machines. That is different from every classical model of computation (RAM machines, etc.) that we usually talk about. It's hard to call something a cellular automaton if it has to expand exponentially in size as it evolves. Thus, 't Hooft concretely predicts that if his CA model is right, then quantum computers can't work. Idk whether Wolfram addresses this issue.
Wolfram's new physics is based on "hypergraphs", not quite cellular automata, but the point stand that they are an entirely general framework, and therefore useless for the stated purpose.